Slang & Abbreviations — Unit 27, Upper-intermediate English

**Workplace Messaging Policy — Know Your Register**

Effective professional communication depends on matching your language to your audience and context. This is what linguists call **register** — the level of formality you adopt based on situation. Developing **register awareness** is no longer optional: it is a fundamental expectation for all staff from their first day in the organisation.

**External correspondence** — emails to clients, suppliers, partners, and regulatory bodies — must always maintain a formal tone. Abbreviations such as **BTW** (by the way), **IMO** (in my opinion), and **FYI** (for your information) are acceptable on internal platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, but they must never appear in any external email, client proposal, or official document. Contracted informal forms such as **gonna** (going to) or **wanna** (want to) convey carelessness and must be replaced with their full equivalents in all formal writing. These choices, while minor, signal a great deal about professionalism and attention to detail.

For time-sensitive situations, the abbreviation **ASAP** is acceptable in internal messages and quick team updates. In external communications, however, phrases such as 'at your earliest convenience' or 'by close of business' are strongly preferred. Similarly, if you want to **touch base** with a colleague before a call, an internal message works well; for meeting invitations sent to outside stakeholders, precise and formal wording is expected throughout.

Within the team, it is common and encouraged to **ping** a colleague with a quick note, or to send a **heads-up** before a deadline falls due. Fast internal communication is a genuine strength, and casual language within the team is entirely appropriate. The guiding principle is always audience: what is natural among colleagues may appear careless or unprofessional to a client or senior partner.

**Register awareness** is developed through the onboarding communications module, which all new employees must complete before engaging with external contacts. A full list of formal alternatives for the most common informal expressions is available in the company **Style Guide** on the intranet. Department heads are responsible for addressing any register violations in external correspondence within their teams promptly and documenting them for future review.

For questions or specific examples, contact comms@company.internal or call extension 4400. This policy supersedes all previous guidance issued before January 2025.

**Two clarifications, following queries from department heads**

**On abbreviations in regulated correspondence.** The distinction above is between internal and external. A stricter rule applies to anything that may be disclosed to a regulator or produced in legal proceedings, which includes internal messages. **FYI** and **ASAP** are acceptable there; humour, sarcasm and speculation are not, whatever the platform. A message beginning "lol this will never pass audit" is an internal message today and an exhibit later.

**On staff for whom English is an additional language.** Several heads have raised, correctly, that this policy asks colleagues to master two registers rather than one, and that informal English is the harder of the two because it is not taught. Abbreviations are learnable from the **Style Guide**; knowing that "**touch base**" is acceptable while "**gonna**" is not requires exposure rather than study. Managers should treat register errors in this group as a training matter and never as carelessness. The onboarding module has been extended with a section on informal usage for exactly this reason.

**A final point on enforcement.** "Documenting violations for future review" has been read as a disciplinary provision. It is not. The purpose is to identify which expressions recur, so the **Style Guide** can be updated. No register error has ever resulted in disciplinary action here and none will.