Business English: Expressing opinions in English




Tensed atmosphere in the meeting, disagreements, sounds familiar? So what to do if boss asks you to give your own opinion about that matter, at that moment? Expressing opinion in business is different  now, than it used to be ten to fifteen years ago. Now, everything is less formal, but that's exactly where you can make some mistakes. To me, it's like when somebody asks you to dress nice casual. Even though everything is so informal, there are some rules we should stick to. 
Depending on a situation, sometimes we should say directly what we think, and sometimes we should be more careful, and express carefully what we want. 
Also, there are some differences about how to express in front of many people in the meeting, or when we are in the meeting with only one coworker. When there is a group of people in the meeting, we should stick to a formal style in order to avoid the risk of being misunderstood, which is easy to fix when we are in one to one meeting, when we can check and explain right away what we wanted to say. 
In a formal communication, and if we want to be careful, and to express our opinion in more diplomatic manner, it is better to use expressions like could, might, would, instead of can, will, must. We can start our sentences with:
"In my view.." or "From my point of view...", 
"To my mind...",
"I believe", 
" Personally speaking...", 
"I feel this isn't the right time...", 
"I guess that's one way to go, but...", 
"I don't know, but it seems that...",
"I'm not sure that's the best idea...",
 "I am unconvinced that..." 
If we are the one who's asking the questions, we can always say:
"What do you think...", 
"What are your thoughts...", 
"In your opinion...", 
"From your point of view..."
If there's no need to be that formal and careful about what we are saying, we can use sentences like:
"To be perfectly frank...", 
"It's obvious to me...", 
"As far as I'm concerned...", 
"It's clear to me...",
"There's no doubt..."
If we pay attention about what we are saying, people will understand us more easy, and our communication will be more successful. That's why we need to take care about our speech, and the world will become better and nicer for all of us.

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