You can be excellent at your job and still lose a little credibility in a single sentence. A colleague opens your email, reads “Please find the report attached, its ready for review,” and something small but stubborn happens: a flicker of doubt. Not about your work — about your attention to detail. At work, your written English is often the first version of you that people meet: the email before the meeting, the message before the call, the report before the results. The mistakes below are the ones that quietly dent that first impression — and every one of them is fixable once you know where to look.
Apostrophes: the errors people notice first
Nothing gives you away faster than a misplaced apostrophe, because these are words your reader uses all day too. Its is possessive — “the team hit its target.” It’s means “it is” or “it has.” The test takes one second: if you can expand it to “it is,” keep the apostrophe; if you can’t, drop it. The same trick rescues your versus you’re (you are), and their, there and they’re. Get one of these wrong in the opening line of an email and a reader will notice it before they’ve taken in anything else you wrote.
Comma splices make you look rushed
This is the slip even strong writers make under time pressure: joining two complete sentences with only a comma. “I’ve attached the figures, let me know if anything looks off.” Both halves could stand on their own, so a comma isn’t strong enough to hold them together. Use a full stop, a semicolon, or a joining word: “I’ve attached the figures. Let me know if anything looks off,” or “…the figures, and let me know…” Short, clean sentences don’t only read as correct — they read as confident, which at work is half the message.
Subject–verb agreement in long sentences
Agreement is easy in a short sentence and treacherous in a long one, because the subject and the verb drift apart and you end up matching the verb to the nearest noun instead of the real subject. “The list of action points are attached” should be is — the list is attached, not the points. “Each of the managers have signed off” should be has, because each is singular. Words like everyone, nobody and the team take a singular verb too. When a sentence runs long, find the true subject and make the verb agree with that — not with whatever word happens to sit just in front of it.
The slips that quietly mark you as a learner
A handful of errors are rare among native speakers, so they stand out sharply. “I am agree” is simply “I agree.” “I look forward to hear from you” needs the -ing form: “to hearing from you.” “I didn’t received it” should be “didn’t receive.” Watch the prepositions, too: you discuss a plan, not “discuss about” it, and you explain something to someone, not “explain me.” None of these mean your English is weak — they’re predictable patterns, and once someone points them out you rarely make them again. If your job runs on email and meetings, our Workplace English course drills exactly these patterns in the situations you actually write in, so the fixes become automatic rather than something you have to stop and remember.
Catch them before you hit send
You don’t need to become a grammar expert; you need a thirty-second habit. Read anything important aloud before you send it — your ear catches comma splices and missing words that your eye skims straight over. Run the “it is” test on every its. Keep your sentences shorter than you think you need to. Let a spell-checker flag problems, but don’t trust it blindly — it will happily wave through “their” where you meant “there.” Above all, learn your own three repeat offenders, because nearly everyone makes the same few mistakes on a loop, and fixing those three cleans up most of what you send.
Clean workplace English isn’t about sounding clever — it’s about getting out of your own way so your ideas land the way you meant them to. If you’d like to iron out the patterns that keep tripping you up, with a native teacher working through your real emails, reports and meetings, that’s exactly what we do at Kensington English. A few focused lessons is often all it takes to stop second-guessing every message before you press send.
