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The Illiteracy of Corporate American E-Mail
Dave writes "There is a pretty amusing/sad article about functional illiteracy when it comes to professional e-mails. Some of the samples are just ridiculous."
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I work for a fairly large corporation and supervise a group of people. I used to think the spelling mistakes were just typing errors, that all of the grammatical mistakes and punctuation errors were just laziness. Don't get me wrong, I mistype words occasionally and I certainly do not always use perfect grammar. But, I see an awful lot of emails and reports that are nearly incomprehensible. I have also come to the conclusion that an awful lot of people really do not know how to spell or have a basic understanding of grammar. I guess further evidence that our public education system is failing miserably.
Just a couple weeks ago this comment made sense, and hey, now it makes sense even more.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Perhaps it's just another Americanism, but over here in England we spell it 'grammar' :)
A lot of this not-ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition and not-starting-a-sentence-with-a-conjunction nonsense goes back to a failed 17th Century attempt to fashion English grammar after that of Latin. For every one of these rules there is a perfectly correct example from before the period of False Latinization. This silliness must be distinguished from true grammatical errors involving constructions that make it difficult or impossible to understand what the writer is trying to say. That is the key point here. Language is about communication. If it doesn't communicate well, it is BAD language.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
How you speak -- and write -- affects others' perceptions of you. When you write a report or an e-mail, you don't always know who will be reading it along the way. particularly in larger organizations. The county government for which I work has 16,000 employees, 14,000 of them with e-mail accounts. I see e-mails from other IT departments on a fairly routine basis, and some of them are simply painful to read. They may have aced their CCIE exam, but if I don't already know them then I may not take them to be so bright if they don't know basic grammar like where to capitalize and where to put periods and commas (overuse of which are probably the most common non-spelling error I see). Pretty much everyone is using Outlook 2002 or 2003, and the vast majority of them are using Word as their e-mail editor, so they really have little excuse as the checks are turned on by default.
I've offered to buy a couple of grammar manuals for the department, but no one seems to be interested, and no one with purchasing power will authorize it through normal channels.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The author George Orwell wrote an article about this in 1945; I find it a very interesting read, and probably even more relevant today. (It seems remarkably prescient in many respects.) It's called Politics and the English Language, but don't let the title put you off: it's not about politics per se, just about how writers (mis)use English in various types of writing, political and otherwise.
It's online in many places, for example here and here. Well worth a read.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The New York Times utilizes their own style manual with rather specific rules. It's most likely not an issue with a Microsoft product, but instead the paper following their own grammar rules. The manual is available here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812 963881/002-3543086-2126403?v=glance