Tuesday, August 18, 2009

THE CHALLENGE OF GOOD ENGLISH (AMERICAN), Part I

Being a good medical transcriptionist is not just a matter of completing a training course and then putting your nose to the grindstone. It actually can be a lifelong process of learning.

Learning more and more about medicine itself is a thrilling process, and many of us can also see the obvious utility of keeping ourselves updated.

Wheras, language is often a huge blind spot. We take it so much for granted. If we do rarely happen to think about it, it's never in the context of needing to improve our command of English. What we do see instead, is a seat-of-the-pants approach towards our language. "My language skill seems to be adequate; I can mostly make sense of my dictations..." and there the story tends to end.

How rather unfortunate! Failing to gain mastery over English can be the one thing that is holding you back as you try to go from being a routine MT, to a really good one - one who will be able to go on to become an editor, or even a QA, a team leader, and so on.



An average command of English will leave you, at best, as an average MT!

We'll follow up shortly with some interesting ways to fall in love with, and then to keep improving our mastery of, the English language

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