International business and technical communication has been largely concerned with identifying cultural differences affecting communication, paying only minor attention to language. Moreover, the focus has been on the U.S. worker going abroad or on communicative situations of relatively short duration. However, as the workplace becomes more international and as foreign workers are sent by their companies to the United States to work in U.S. branches or subsidiaries, the communicative situation becomes long-term and the role of language becomes central. Very little investigation of the non-native speaker of English in the U.S. workplace has occurred. This project is a case study of a French native, who is employed at a U.S. branch of an international company. He was identified by his company as a poor writer whose value as an employee justified the time and expense of special tutoring to improve his writing. Functioning as a participant observer, I tutored him in writing and English as a second language for 11 months, made tape recordings of the tutoring sessions, collected writing samples, and interviewed him and his supervisor about writing. In a contextualized analysis of a memo written to his supervisor, I found problems in organization, content, style, and document design. Because U.S. conventions and expectations for workplace writing are not followed, readability is affected and the document cannot be skimmed. In an analysis of errors at the sentence level in 15 documents, I found a high number and wide variety of errors, the most common being lexical. The density of errors results in reader fatigue or overload, more profound than the effects of specific errors. While a significant percentage of the errors could be identified and corrected by the participant, many represent language-learning problems, indicating fossilization and cessation of learning. Influences on the writing include the French language and culture, thinking and communicating preferences, and competing discourse conventions. Influences on the level of English proficiency include motivation, social and psychological distancing, and a strong desire to maintain an identity as French. This case study offers a microcosm of the role of language in an international workplace where English is the dominant language and also provides a site for reconsideration of the role of English in international communication. I argue that a new model of communication will be needed, a model already being developed outside the United States, which begins not from perceptions of difference and miscommunication but from a framework of interactive, jointly constructed, multiple viewpoints. This new model has implications for research, pedagogy, and the workplace.