What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student.

"i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you".

Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it.

"E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies tearing their hair out."

A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. B The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said.

"It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard."

Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: "I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."

The incoherence of that message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training.

"The more electronic and global we get, the less important the spoken word has become, and in e-mail clarity is critical," said Sean Phillips, recruitment director at another Silicon Valley corporation, Applera, a supplier of equipment for life science research, where most employees have advanced degrees. "Considering how highly educated our people are, many can't write clearly in their day-to-day work."

Some $2.9 billion of the $3.1 billion the National Commission on Writing estimates that corporations spend each year on remedial training goes to help current employees, with the rest spent on new hires. The corporations surveyed were in the mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, finance, insurance, real estate and service industries, but not in wholesale, retail, agriculture, forestry or fishing, the commission said. Nor did the estimate include spending by government agencies to improve the writing of public servants.

An entire educational industry has developed to offer remedial writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in business and technical writing.

Kathy Keenan, a onetime legal proofreader who teaches business writing at the University of California Extension, Santa Cruz, said she sought to dissuade students from sending business messages in the crude shorthand they learned to tap out on their pagers as teenagers.

"hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again," one student wrote to her recently. "i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respond . thanking u for ur cooperation."

Most of her students are midcareer professionals in high-tech industries, Ms. Keenan said.

The Sharonview Federal Credit Union in Charlotte, N.C., asked about 15 employees to take a remedial writing course. Angela Tate, a mortgage processor, said the course eventually bolstered her confidence in composing e-mail, which has replaced much work she previously did by phone, but it was a daunting experience, since she had been out of school for years. "It was a challenge all the way through," Ms. Tate said.

Even C.E.O.'s need writing help, said Roger S. Peterson, a freelance writer in Rocklin, Calif., who frequently coaches executives. "Many of these guys write in inflated language that desperately needs a laxative," Mr. Peterson said, and not a few are defensive. "They're in denial, and who's going to argue with the boss?"

But some realize their shortcomings and pay Mr. Peterson to help them improve. Don Morrison, a onetime auditor at Deloitte & Touche who has built a successful consulting business, is among them.

"I was too wordy," Mr. Morrison said. "I liked long, convoluted passages rather than simple four-word sentences. And I had a predilection for underlining words and throwing in multiple exclamation points. Finally Roger threatened to rip the exclamation key off my keyboard."

Exclamation points were an issue when Linda Landis Andrews, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, led a workshop in May for midcareer executives at an automotive corporation based in the Midwest. Their exasperated supervisor had insisted that the men improve their writing.

"I get a memo from them and cannot figure out what they're trying to say," the supervisor wrote Ms. Andrews.

When at her request the executives produced letters they had written to a supplier who had failed to deliver parts on time, she was horrified to see that tone-deaf writing had turned a minor business snarl into a corporate confrontation moving toward litigation.

"They had allowed a hostile tone to creep into the letters," she said. "They didn't seem to understand that those letters were just toxic."

"People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully," Ms. Andrews said. "I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life."

Not everyone agrees. Kaitlin Duck Sherwood of San Francisco, author of a popular how-to manual on effective e-mail, argued in an interview that exclamation points could help convey intonation, thereby avoiding confusion in some e-mail.

"If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation points," Ms. Sherwood advises in her guide, available at www.webfoot.com, where she offers a vivid example:

"NO!!!! If you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat the motors, and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!"

Dr. Hogan, who founded his online Business Writing Center a decade ago after years of teaching composition at Illinois State University here, says that the use of multiple exclamation points and other nonstandard punctuation like the :-) symbol, are fine for personal e-mail but that companies have erred by allowing experimental writing devices to flood into business writing.

He scrolled through his computer, calling up examples of incoherent correspondence sent to him by prospective students.

"E-mails - that are received from Jim and I are not either getting open or not being responded to," the purchasing manager at a construction company in Virginia wrote in one memorandum that Dr. Hogan called to his screen. "I wanted to let everyone know that when Jim and I are sending out e-mails (example- who is to be picking up parcels) I am wanting for who ever the e-mail goes to to respond back to the e-mail. Its important that Jim and I knows that the person, intended, had read the e-mail. This gives an acknowledgment that the task is being completed. I am asking for a simple little 2 sec. Note that says "ok", "I got it", or Alright."

The construction company's human resources director forwarded the memorandum to Dr. Hogan while enrolling the purchasing manager in a writing course.

"E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies at their wits' end."

How about high school English teachers who decided that they were bored by English grammar (back when they knew it)? Now a kid has to learn English grammar elsewhere. Sometimes the only option a family can afford is to leverage foreign language lessons in school (checking the rep of the teachers to ensure that they are careful to teach grammar). My niece is learning English grammar in her Latin class.

H.L. Mencken was an excellent semicolon user. If folks would read one of his collections, they would learn how to use a semicolon by osmosis, even without being able to explain the rule.

I found the phone to be more effective when there was a need for detailed conversation.

Do you mean you actually reached a live person by telephone?

The days are long gone when we all diagramed sentences in fourth grade. Our high school graduates are grammar free, and it will show throughout their careers. Lazy teachers and students can't fake correct writing.

Here's a wonderful book, which everyone should read:

Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English, Second Edition.

It's painfully witty and serves as a useful guide to grammar all at once.

Syntax is different for differing languages: however it is a coherent logic-encouraging entity in the most powerful languages. After all, German scientists weaned on German syntax and grammar built the sucessful Moon rocket. English academicians weaned on the classics decrypted Enigma and Linear-B. Wheras speakers of Swahili (a deliberately simple flat-tense trade language) have built, umm...

I would just like to add for those un-versed in the English classics: OMFG!! Jane Austen totally ROOLZ!!!!

In the company I work for, the people higher up the food chain consider their time too valuable to be wasted responding to our messages. They often respond only after a situation has reached critical mass and then berate us for letting things get out of control. I notice also that they often respond with catch phrases and slogans rather then intelligent comment. Perhaps rude behavior is a method of control for some people in corporations.

I've done this myself. Not Latin, but other languages.

There's a series of grammar books, "English Grammar for the Student of [insert language here]", for people who need to learn formal English grammar before they can learn other grammars.

It's the Peter Principal. Of course, no one knows what that is, because it was explained in a book.

Corporations present us with additional problems, besides promoting the incompetent to positions of some authority. Corporations employ millions. They routinely subject their employees to personality profiling, indoctrination, dictates regarding the expression of speech and the procurement of medical care -- things no conservative would ever let his government do, but readily give his employer the power to do.

Support small business.

Sorry June, I forgot to answer your question.

"On another note, what is a prole??"

Short for either "lumpenproletariat" or "proletariat": terms used by Marx to describe the mass of unthinking people who need the shining light of socialism to guide them.

You can see why "proles" is a perjorative term.

k,
Yes, it shows in college.

When I was in grad school I was a TA for intro history courses. In one class I worked, students had to submit a few paragraphs every Friday discussing, very generally, one of the week's readings.

I was shocked, frankly, at how poor some of those papers were. Most were OK, a few really stellar, but then some were just abysmal. This situation was pretty much the same for all the TAs in my class year.

One in particular I was convinced was ESL; I'd never heard him speak but he could barely spell, let alone construct a reasoned argument. I assumed he was a foreign student and having trouble writing because of it. Turned out he wasn't foreign at all, just a victim of a piss-poor school.

Now, that also begged the question of how he even got into the university, but I leave that for another thread.

Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.

Email facilitates pre-existing illiteracy or sloth because it's easier to do than to write something on paper and stick it in an envelope, address the envelope, buy and stick a stamp on it, and put it in the mail box. One also doesn't have to wait weeks for a reply. I don't see any reason why an email cannot and should not be written with as much care as a paper document.

Catch phrases and slogans?

It sounds like we’re singing from the same hymn sheet. Nevertheless, I’m sure the muckety-mucks are just trying to touch base and leverage synergies so you can get on the same page and make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. That way, you can view it from thirty thousand feet to see the big picture and keep ahead of the game. Of course, once you get all your ducks in a row, you may also need to peel the onion to see what is coming down the pike. Sometimes there are issues that need to be put on the front burner, too, to help shorten the launch curve. You really have to think outside the box in today’s corporate world. After all, it’s important to hit the ground running so you can get more bang for your buck.

If you’d prefer, we can have a sidebar or table this for later. :)

CW,
And this problem of sloppy writing is not limited to internal company messages. It shows in advertising too.

The latest one to really frost me is...Radio Shack? Circuit City? "You've got questions. We've got answers". Fowler might say it's OK, but the word "got" just bugs me; it's totally unnecessary there.

Or, how many times have you read a description of a company, or a "mission statement" (a horrible phrase), and come away with no clue about what the company actually does?

Or, how the heck did we get anything done before all these companies sprouted up to "provide solutions"?!

Clausery:
it has a subject and a verb!

Phrasery:
going at it the hard way, with no main verb or subject!

Dependent clausery:
Which you discover,
Because it needs more
If something is missing,

I did this too many years. I can correct all the grammar in a long work and have no idea of what it says.

All your commas are belong to us!

"It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy,"

No, but going forward they want to expedite the aquisition of human resources with the requisite skill set which would enable said persons to produce on an ongoing basis quality communications, 24/7.

I think a lot of younger workers are used to the 'Instant Messaging' way of writing. I'd read somewhere last year, that teachers are having to remind their students that the abbreviations used online don't work in essays for school.

c,
I can smell what you're steppin' in. You also might want to run that up the flagpole once you get some metrics to help put on the brakes. Unless you want to rob Peter to pay Paul, and fall back just to core competencies, you'll have to push the envelope or the whole food chain is going to come down on you.

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