For non-native English speakers · Engineering & technical
Sound sure of yourself
in engineering & technical.
Explain the system, defend the design, report the incident. Your grammar is not the problem. What makes English sound confident is which word takes the weight, where the pause goes, and where the voice rises and falls — and nobody teaches that. Below are real lines for this situation with those three things marked. Hear each one said well, record yours, and see how close you came. Free, no account.
gold = the word that takes the weight · ‖ = a pause · ↗ the voice rises · ↘ the voice lands · → stays up, more to come
8 of 100 lines in this path
Lines people actually say.
Marked by the same engine that marks your own script in the app. The gold word is the one to lean on; everything else is lighter than you think.
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mediumExplaining a design
The trade-off out loud
We chose consistency over speed here.
Reads are slower.
Nothing is ever wrong, which is what this data needs.
Hear this line said well → -
mediumIncidents
The blameless post-mortem
Nobody is in trouble.
If anyone feels they are, this review is worthless.
Walk me through your morning.
Hear this line said well → -
mediumTalking to non-engineers
Translating a technical problem
Forget the mechanism.
What it means is your Monday report will be wrong about once a quarter.
Hear this line said well → -
hardCode and review
Rejecting a change
I do not think we should merge this.
It is good code solving a problem I do not think we have.
Hear this line said well → -
mediumWorking with others
Advocating for tooling
We lose about an hour each, every day, to the build.
Two weeks of work makes that ten minutes.
Hear this line said well → -
mediumDelivery and process
Explaining why it is late
Two things: the API changed, and I underestimated the migration.
The second one is on me.
Hear this line said well → -
hardSecurity and risk
Pushing back on a shortcut
I am not going to do that.
It would work and it would put customer data somewhere it should not be.
Hear this line said well → -
easyWorking across teams
Explaining to finance
The bill went up because usage went up.
Same rate, more calls.
Here is the graph.
Hear this line said well →
What this path covers
The moments inside it.
- Defending a designThe trade-off, out loud
- An incident reportWhat broke, and why
- Explaining to non-engineersNo jargon, no condescension
- Giving an estimateHonest about uncertainty
One last thing
Hear it in a voice like yours,
then in yours.
Pick the accent closest to yours and hear one voice say a line flat, then confident — same words, same accent. Then practise any of these lines against it. Your own voice takes a ten-second read and a free account. No card.