I just received a reply to my “Macro Scheduler Resume” mailing that I sent out a few weeks ago. The sender was complaining about an incorrect spelling and suggested that my email would be seen as unprofessional if forwarded to other businesses. His complaint was that I used the spelling “Organisation”.
The fact is I am British. I live in England and was educated here. MJT Net Ltd is a British company, registered in England and Wales. Organisation is the correct British spelling. I make no apologies for being British and I can’t help automatically using British spelling when I write.
Definition and Spelling:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/organisation
Should I have used the spelling “Organization” in an email sent to my customers? Well, in our software and documentation we do TRY to use American English spellings as much as possible, just because we know that around 50% of our customers are in the USA. But from time to time we might miss one or two. After all we can’t help using British spelling and may not even realise (realize) there is a different American variant sometimes. Also a large number of our customers are European, consisting of many British. So what should we do? Write different versions of the software and documentation for different people? That would be quite inefficient and is simply not practical (although, with the help of others, we are slowly getting our software and documentation translated into other languages).
Anyway, when I write emails I prefer to write in a personal style. My emails are from ME, not a marketing person or a robot. I actually think that in this day and age this is quite important. So I will write using my own style. That means I will use British spellings.
The email I sent was designed to be forwarded on to others. It was a light-hearted way at, hopefully, encouraging a bit of word-of-mouth and introducing customers to our affiliate schemes, whereby they can benefit from recommending our software to others. But there was certainly no obligation to do so. And of course there is also nothing to stop anyone modifying, localising (localizing) or even translating it for their chosen recipients.
So, I make no apologies for being British and for writing the way I was taught to write.
