Before You Begin: Your English Is Already Better Than You Think

This book is written in my English.

Not simplified, not translated, not run through a readability checker to make sure it sits comfortably at B2 level. My words, my rhythm, my long sentences that go where they go and get there eventually, my swearing when it earns its place, my parenthetical asides that probably say more than the main sentence does, my voice, unapologetic.

And if you're reading this in your second language, if you're a Spanish speaker or a German or an Italian or a Japanese person and you've been apologising for your accent for years, then I want you to notice something: you're already doing it.

You're already here, making sense of a British man whose mind works like the branches of a tree, one main trunk of an idea that he sets off down with every intention of staying on, until another idea makes its way in, and that idea leads to another, and before anyone can remember where we started we're seven or eight branches away from the original trunk, in English.

That’s the whole point.

Because I could have written this in simpler English. I even tried it for a while, translating myself, softening the edges, making it easier. At one point I wrote everything in Spanish, because most of my clients are Spanish speakers and it felt like the considerate thing to do. And then I realised that if I do that, if I spoon-feed you the language I'm telling you that you're already capable of, I'm contradicting myself before page one.

So I didn’t.

This book is the argument and the evidence at the same time. If you can read it, then your English is already better than you think it is.

You just haven’t given yourself permission to use it yet.

— Richard

More Than Words — Essays on Language, Identity, and The Courage to Speak — is out this summer. If you want to read it before launch and leave an honest review, say so in the comments. Your name might even end up inside it.