Nama : Hamsir
Ruangan : D4 Pagi
No. Urut : 25
ENGLISH FOR BUSSINESS
Business means
buying and selling, and English is the name of our mother tongue. Business
English is obviously such English as is used in mercantile transactions. Our
definition is quickly made.
But it will bear expansion. We
must answer certain questions that
inevitably arise. Is some special brand of English used in business? And how
are we to know when we are studying business and when merely the English of
business?
Take the first of
these two questions. There are of course certain words which name business
transactions primarily. Buy, sell, exchange, barter, trade, purchase, shop,
customer, hire, rent, pay, fee, price, retail, wholesale, lease, mortgage,
merchandise, commodity, goods, stock, office, factory, finance, money,
funds, capital, interest,
sum, amount, balance,
cash, currency, bill, receipt, note, draft, check, bank, cashier, bookkeeper,
stenographer, clerk - hundreds of words like these will occur to us at random
as being mercantile words in a peculiar sense.
To be sure, they are not all
limited to business transactions. Note the word brand. It is primarily
mercantile, naming a particular kind of goods. But in the second paragraph,
above, the phrase "special brand of English" appears. Here the word
is used figuratively. Every business word can be extended in that way to social
or literary use. When we speak of wholesale slaughter, or of a stock of words,
we use commercial figures of speech, and Americans are exceedingly fond of
doing so. You have heard people speak of a thoroughly posted man, as if a man
were a ledger. You have heard them speak of the balance of the day, as if time
were literally money. You have noticed that an American likes to claim
everything in sight; I mean, he prefers to claim that a thing is so, rather
than assert, declare, contend, allege, maintain, or swear that it is so.
§2.But the strictly commercial
words, again, aria not the only ones employed in business. In addition to such
words as are listed above in our third paragraph, business employs thousands of
terms from science and technology. If a man is buying or selling machinery, he
must know the names of the machines. If it falls to him to buy the parts of
them, he must know the names of the parts. Does business English, then, include
the study of everything that is bought or sold? If it did, it would include
nearly the whole dictionary. Everything is bought or sold, from surgical
instruments to Egyptian mummies. Nothing is exempt but heaven and love and
faith. "Tis only heaven that is given away; Mis only God may be had for
the asking." And there are gloomy times when we feel that even faith and
love are sold.
Quite clearly we are not called
upon to master the whole dictionary. No man's life is long enough for that. So
far as special study of words is concerned, we must limit it to a few which are
most commonly employed in mercantile transactions.
And I fear that even with these
we shall not be quite certain what to do. In our eleventh chapter will be found
brief histories of certain commercial terms. But it is not pretended that
knowing the history of a word will usually be of much practical value to the
young man in business. The word dollar has a curious history, being connected
with our word dale, a valley. A dollar is a dale-coin, a piece of money first
coined in a certain dale, or Thal. But who cares, except the philologist or the
antiquary? "Show me how to get the dollar," says our business man,
"and you bookworms may have the derivation." He feels that he is
quite literary enough if he manages to spell dollar with two ll's. It bores him
to go farther into derivations. And it would be bad business to urge him to go
back far into history when he is interested only in the burning present and the
glowing future.
§3. If we pick up any business
letter we see at once that the words it contains are chiefly common words, not
especially mercantile. The technical buying or selling words are present, but
they are in the minority. What makes the letter good or bad is the choice and
arrangement of words to express thought and feeling. It is their composition,
or putting together. And this is really the subject that we are after.
"Business English" in the sense here used is merely short for
"Business English Composition. "
"English," as used in
schools and colleges, now means primarily English composition. It includes also
the study of English literature, but chiefly because a mastery of literature
helps the student to a mastery of writing and speaking. None of us common
people ever invents a word, and the few Edisons are lucky if they add half a
dozen to the language. We go to other people or to books for our words. They
are the great social heritage into which we enter, and literature is the best
place to find them, because there they are alive, each in its context. The
proper study of literature is so practical that I dare not confess how
practical - because some people think it is a matter of pleasure pure and
simple. The words of literature are practical; the setting of them is
practical; the knowledge of life that they give us is practical. The right sort
of business man cannot read Shakspere without getting a clearer insight into
those springs of human emotion which he has to consider daily. And if this
reading makes him better in point of courage and good cheer and character, why,
that is practical too.
But this is not a plea for the
study of Shakspere. For all the illustrative matter used in this book we shall
go to business documents pure and simple. We shall have business
narratives, business descriptions, business arguments,
business explanations. We are to try to get at the principles of English
composition on business topics:
Our purpose is to point out some
of the established principles which govern effective expression. Everybody is
ready to admit that the power of effective expression is a financial asset. It
helps the stenographer, the salesman, the manager, the advertiser, the
correspondent. It makes for more responsible positions and advanced salaries.
Good selling-talk sells goods. Judicious explanations remove difficulties.
Persuasive arguments reach buyers.
