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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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It seems like there are two separate possible problems here: people are coming into a company without the writing skills they need, and/or employees are not treating email communication with the same professionalism as other company documents.
:)
For the first problem, either a) don't hire people who can't write, or b) provide on-the job training to bring writing skills up to an acceptable level.
For the second, I think the company needs to make a clear set of standards for both internal and external communication, and enforce them. External communication - to customers, etc. - is particularly important. Anything as badly written as those examples would be deleted from my inbox before I got to the end of the first sentence.
I used to work as a technical writer for a large company, and they kept us busy. It's fine to hire engineers who are good at what they do, even if they don't have great writing skills - as log as you also hire someone to decipher and rewrite everything that comes out of the engineering dept.
PS. I respectfully submit that the headline should read either "The illegibility of email" or "The illiteracy of corporate america"... I might try to make my email literary, but not literate (and my slashdot posts are probably neither...)
When I was teaching econ, I several times made the mistake of setting an essay test. It showed that the American students couldn't write. When I marked them down for incomprehensiblity, they were shocked! ``You should grade the econ, not the grammer.'' they said. Unfortunately, the grammer and organization was bad enough that there wasn't any coherent content to grade.
Some of them did know the material, but it doesn't matter what you know, if you can't communicate it clearly to others. If you can't communicate, you might as well know nothing, because that's what everyone will assume.
By contrast, some students for whom English was a second language had grammer problems, but their writing was coherent enough that I could figure out what they meant.
See what I've been reading.
After all, Outlook automatically corrects your spelling for you as you type.
"patience" is spelled correctly. In context, it's probably the wrong word, but it's still spelled correctly.
I've seen that happen quite a few times - people relying on the Outlook/Word spellchecked and it corrects their email by inserting correctly spelled, but irrelevant words.
The CxO drones don't even notice it.
Sloppy writing implies carelessness at best, ineptitude at worst. It's not okay to write badly in a business setting; at least not in inter-business communication.
Why is anything anything?
I may be able to interpret poorly written English, but that's not to say it's enjoyable. Presentation errors not only make the individual committing them look bad, but also take away focus from the actual content.
I expect people communicating with me in a business context to make a reasonable effort to communicate clearly in much the same way that I would be offended if a coworker chose to give me messages scribbled in sloppily written crayon: Poor presentation distracts from the content. The scribbled memo would needlessly require extra time to read and interpret; likewise do poorly spelled messages.
Another aspect that falls out of the above is one of respect. Since comprehending sloppily-written messages takes more time and effort, writing well is nothing less than displaying respect for the value of the time of one's readers, whereas writing poorly is stating that your time and effort is more valuable than that of the individual to whom you send your message. I make a serious effort to do this when writing material for others' consumption; consequently, I find it only reasonable for others to respond in kind.
They should and do. People who send poorly written email (particularly mass mailings) are genuinely and rightly offensive, for all the reasons above.1) So the recipient doesn't have to spend 20 seconds trying to work out what your meant, or wasting both his and your time by replying asking for a clarification.
2) So people don't think you're a moron.
3) So people outside the company don't think you're all morons (if the message is forwarded, as often happens, sometimes inadvertently).
Anything you write, anywhere, can come back to haunt you.