[SAJ]

Hey, this isn't a problem, it's an opportunity!

Why do I suppose that there are ANY NUMBER of FReepers who could offer their services, no doubt quite profitably, to these beleaguered corporations?

[Texas_Jarhead]

me rights emale reel good

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

I have been writing detailed e-mails and typed letters to business people. Many will not even give me the courtesy of a reply.

Writing skills are not the only thing missing from corporate America. Common courtesy is gone, too.

I believe it is about attention span. The average American seems to have the attention span of a five-year-old.

[SamAdams76]

I can attest to this. Most of the emails I get in my company are deplorable. It is as if a bunch of second graders are running the company! If I send more than a paragraph in reply, I sometimes get the comment "You didn't have to write a novel!" Many of them don't realize that I can type faster than I can talk!

Being able to write clearly and type it out quickly certainly is an advantage for me career-wise. I've been in offices of vice-presidents, watching them painfully "hunt and peck" at their keyboards, trying to keep up with the email. The virtual elimination of personal secretaries in our corporate culture has exposed a lot of poor writing skills in upper management.

[visualops]

The increasing use of email simply exposes a problem that already existed.

[tm22721]

Wanting more formality in writing smacks of Jane Austen snobbery, not better communications.

Because I can understand most emails without a problem. Why ? They resemble the vernacular.

Get off your high horse and join the proles.

BUMP

[prion]

Huh. I'm a cubicle monkey. I get a ton of emails every day, and I don't get any which stand out as strikingly illiterate. I can think of an IS type who uses funky punctuation, but that's more quirky than ignorant.

The worst communicators, easily, are the Big Guys. Especially those who once had the luxury of secretaries writing all their communications (in fact, many of them have gone back to having the secretaries clean up their prose).

[Junior]

Anyone who has spent any time scrolling through replies on an FR thread understands the horrific state of written literacy in this country.

"But they still understand me," is not an excuse. The person on the receiving end of an email or post forms an opinion of the person whose writing he or she is reading (for instance, most people think I'm a pompous ass), and that influences the gist of the message being conveyed. In other words, "they may not understand you" in the manner you believe to be the case.

[durasell]

It's very simple. There are certain skills you need to move up in the world and writing is one of them. If you're in a corporate environment, you should also know the following:

A) Knowing how to buy a suit that fits
B) Ability to eat a meal without ruining a tie
C) Basic knowledge of architecture, literature, art, classical music or jazz.

All of this, of course, is in addition to being able to perform well in the job assigned.

[Redleg Duke]

Thanks for posting this article. I just forwarded it to my staff with a recommendation that they cleanup their acts! An individual or organization is measured by their communication. For too long, emails have been ignored in this manner.

[raybbr]

If our Human Resources manager wasn't a complete jackass, I would send this to him. He can't write a coherent memo to save his life.

[RadioAstronomer]

Poorly written email drives me crazy at work! LOL

[saveliberty]

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.

[the invisib1e hand]

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.

[aruanan]

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.

[Gefreiter]

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"?!

[Aquinasfan]

"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.

[Mr. Jeeves]

"E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Dr. Hogan said.

Public schools are the party to which English teachers have not been invited. E-mails are just a symptom. ;)

[P.O.E.]

On the other hand, you've got bureaucrats churning out pages and pages of documents with correct grammar and punctuation, but serve no real purpose other than to keep each other employed.

There's some beauty in conciseness, of which e-lingo is perhaps the most egregious exception.

[TomGuy]

In the early 90's a lady whom I supervised would leave me 'reports' on post-it notes.

One day, I came in to work and found some 20 of the smallest-sized post-its, with arrows to show the flow, with some lines written along the edges and on backs. It was like trying to follow a treasure map. I finally gave up and waited for her to arrive before I could understand.

I told her---no more post-it reports----ever!

That was before email. I could only imagine what she would do with email reports.