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I'm interested in finding out whether additionally, besides that, and besides are interchangeable in the following.

There will be a five-percent raise across the board. Additionally/Besides that/Besides, all staff will receive an extra five days’ leave a year.

I'd appreciate your help.

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I would use the following modification of your example sentence: 'There will be a five-percent raise across the board. Additionally, all staff will receive an extra five days leave per year'.

The context of your sentence appears to be an announcement by the management of a company to its employees. These type of communications tend to be more formal grammatically than used in spoken English, which is often much more casual in grammar. Replacing 'Additionally' with ether 'besides' or 'besides that' is much more informal. Someone might use 'besides' rather than 'additionally' when speaking casually but a company making a formal announcement would not normally write the sentence that way, especially if the announcement is a written communication.

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  • What if the sentence occurs as part of a dialogue between two coworkers: You should continue to work for this company. There will be a 5% raise across the board. Besides / Additionally / Besides that, all staff will receive an extra five days' leave a year. Which of the three is acceptable? – Apollyon Mar 12 '17 at 11:38
  • As I mentioned in my answer, you could use any of the three words/variants when using spoken English. People tend to be more casual about judging grammar when listening or speaking and more critical about judging grammar when reading or writing. – Mark Ripley Mar 12 '17 at 14:34
  • I don't think "besides" by itself is likely in a lead-in phrase like this. (AmE) The others are OK. – user3169 Mar 12 '17 at 19:12
  • @user3169: Spoken English tends to have much more casual grammar rules in real life usage than are applied to the formal grammar expected of written English. Using 'besides' at the start of a sentence is not correct when writing but not uncommon when speaking. The dividing line I use for spoken grammar is if something might be said by a native (AmE) English speaker or if it would instead be noticeable as being incorrect, possibly due to being spoken by a non-native English speaker. Some spoken English idioms and slang eventually alter formal English over time. Chill man, I'm hip. – Mark Ripley Mar 23 '17 at 5:06

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