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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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How did these employees get into the company door in the first place? Didn't they have to write some sort of CV that their employers can understand? Or are they gradually getting worse in the corporate/email environment?
P.S. This are one of the Slashdot articles that I am so worrifiedably scared to be picked at by one of these Spelling/Grandma Nazis.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Far too many professionals simply cannot manage to type out a readable email. People with college degrees in high paying jobs should have some degree of competency with the English language. I have to wonder if this has less to do with the format of email and more to do with the disappearance of secretaries.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWFor some reason I've never understood, a lot of people seem to think that because they write electronically, they don't have to spell correctly or use proper grammar. And even if they are naturally bad at such things, it's not like most e-mail clients lack spelling and/or grammar checks. I have no idea why people do this; especially in a situation like this where the writing is more formal and precise. Although for myself, I've conformed to more or less standard writing form in electronic communications.
As more and more people are using phones with SMS/Text messaging capability, their spelling and punctuation will only get worse. Not to mention all the cryptic acronyms. My spelling and grammar are not the greatest, but I married an English major to compensate.
I am so creative, look at my cry for attention in my sig.
The signature appended to every message said his name, company, and job title: "CEO."
/syle
I wish I could mod your post +1 (Sad but True). Our CFO sends out company wide emails that make no sense at all. I often wonder how she was able to (lie/cheat/steal) her way into that position. It is embarrassing when the CFO of a 1+Billion dollar a year company cannot tell the difference between patience/patients or capitol/capital. Now, I'm not perfect... but I also don't send out company wide email very often. When I do have to send out email to others in the company I do this old fashioned thing called "Proof-reading". *sigh* (sad but true)
Actually, I have seen this the other way round. I (German) once had to work with an Asian developer living in England. When talking with him on the phone, his English sounded crude and I had the impression he didn't even know English.
Then we agreed to switch to instant messaging. And we went along fine. His written English was great, while his spoken English was unbearable.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
I will acknowledge that attempts to write in secondary languages can result in more spelling mistakes, odd phrasings and sentence structures, erroneous pluralization and verb conjugation, and so forth. But given the examples in the article, I doubt that there's a language in the world that eschews grammatical structure so wantonly. Sometimes incomprehensibility transcends language.
Speaking of the article, what's with page breaks occurring in the middles of sentences? That's extremely bad style.
Time is money. The problem is that much more time is wasted trying to decipher poorly written emails than, if the writer had taken the time to write it properly in the first place. The problem is even worse when the writing is so poorly done that it conveys a different message than was intended. In fact, just such an example was given in the article.
Indeed, your own post is another example of time wasted due to poor writing skills. It was necessary for me to read your message two or three times in order to determine your meaning. A properly written post would not have required rereading. My time was further wasted by replying to your post with this chastizing comment. You now owe me $2.00
> due to being constantly exposed to your/you're and similar constructs,
> I feel its quality has definitely decreased.
When proof reading, mentally expand all contractions (e.g. you're becomes you are), replace there with here, and replace your with his. If the sentence still makes sense, you're good to go.
I use the same types of tricks in french, expanding "a" to "avoir" and seeing if it changes the sense of the sentence (although that particular trick DOES mean you're proofing with mentally incorrect grammar).
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
No one dares to point out mistakes the Boss makes. Well, not in front of him, at least. Every message that I've seen from the CEO (excepting those written by their secretaries) usually has been worded very strangely. The grammar is usually good, but they tend to use and overuse uncommon words. They also tend to use words incorrectly, especially when they are trying to excite and encourage employees and others.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
When I first came to my current job, I was forced to use Outlook which automatically top posts. I got outlook quote fix, which makes makes it easier to quote in accepted "net" style. A few days later I was called in by our VP and told that I needed to start top posting like everyone else. I printed out several pages on the web where people discuss netiquette, and talk about how you should bottom post and only quote what you need to. Let's just say, I'm lucky I still have my job. I now top post on all business communications.
As an English major, I tend to notice a person's grammar and spelling before almost anything else. For every ten people I meet who can't write above a sixth-grade level, eight of them are born and raised on this continent.
The bigger deal, in my opinion, is that these eight people will probably never improve, while the other two (who were born elsewhere) seem to have ambition to get better. At my part-time job during school, we employ a Japanese kid who is just travelling and working for a year or two. He knew two sentences of English upon arriving ("How are you?" and "I am [his name]"), but has adopted better spoken grammar than most of the other guys at work after only a year. More than once, I've been compelled to 'un-teach' him the brutal pidgin English that he has learned from everyone else. One time, and I am not exaggerating, one of the local boys said to him: "You've got to learn to speak English good, or you'll never get laid." I can only hope that it's true.
The examples in the linked article are, without a shadow of doubt, pure laziness from a bunch of slack-jawed cretins who would rather watch Reality TV than read a book. If you actually listen to the people you walk past in the streets, many of whom wear suits that are worth more than my car, you'll see that it's depressingly common.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
It's incredible that seemingly anyone can just write a book and by virtue of that alone be considered worthy of quoting on such topics. The example she gives is an even better indicator that she doesn't know what she's talking about:
When I read this I imagine Doc Brown freaking out about the "1.21 Gigawatts" needed to power the flux capacitor. Besides, would anyone use email for something that time critical that it's acceptable in society to yell "NO!!!!" in their face and effectively slap their hands away from the controls? She only got two paragraphs in the story, but I think that was two more than she deserved.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
The irony is that a good 60% of the posts in this thread have some bad grammar and/or spelling mistakes. At first I thought it was intentional but then they kept popping up a little too often. I'm not any better. Most of the time I don't make any major spelling or grammar errors, but I forget to close some HTML tag so the whole post is a link.
What I would personally recommend is for everyone to follow spelling and grammar rules in all their written communications, especially IM and IRC (if applicable). When you're on #favchannel (or whatever) and you start capitalizing, punctuating, and generally following the rules of English, you'll see it's a lot easier to do so in other important emails.
If you think you hate grammar and spelling Nazis, imagine one of them being your boss and never telling you your mistakes. That could cost a lot.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
On the topposting, I've kind of suspected that this is a battle between journalistic writing and chronological writing. Most geeks tend to favor the chronological approach.
However, for many people, they want the most important information first (meaning the most recent) and the rest in order of decreasing importance. This mirrors how newspaper articles are written, such that the article can be trimmed after any given paragraph and still be intelligible.
Because I almost always know the context of a given message, it's actually more irritating to me to have to scroll to the bottom, past lots of information I already know to get to the important bit. (yes, I've read ALL of the articles pounding the idea that top posting is bad and I don't care) I prefer to read the important bit first, then look deeper if I need more context.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Oh! Where to begin?
I have received solicitations from a number of businesses including huge corporations who hire advertising agencies to send stuff out.
So many of these little missives contain not only spelling and grammar errors but seem as if they have been transliterated from some completely alien language and sometimes say things that have nothing at all to do with the product or offer.
Additionally, during job hunts, I run across an advert that really requires deciphering and retranslation, if possible.
I find help wanted ads that, for example require prospects be "illiterit in English", requires a "doxtorate" or "dogtorate", a "MA degree" in chemistry and physics or other science (Yes, that's a Masters of Arts degree!), gives "verterines" hiring preference, give the wrong address to apply to, et cetera, ad nauseum.
It's not limited to corporate people--Lawyers, teachers, professors, even editors demonstrate poor literacy.
Illiteracy is pandemic in society and it seems to be intentional, given that it's source is public education--or educators have merely shoved their heads deeper up their--i mean, into their fantasy world and want us all to come along.
People are becoming more of a by-product of public education.
me. --a by-product of public education
It's a stylistic trick to make you click through to the next page - if the page ends in the middle of a sentence you'll know that there's more to read and click next.
Yes, I know that there's also that little 1|2|3 at the bottom of each page, but that broken sentence thing is there as an extra clue/incentive to make you click next to see how the sentence ends.
It's one of the many tricks of commercial copywriting that breaks the rules of proper english...
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/000405.html
Each style is appropriate in its own place.
For normal "one-to-one" email, top-posting is quite appropriate. The most recent information is the most relevant, and should be at the top where it's immediately available without having to scroll down. It's sometimes useful to keep the discussion history in the email (especially if it is ever CC'ed to an extra person who hasn't seen the rest of the thread), but generally, there is no confusion as to which "branch" of the discussion you are replying.
For "many-to-many" forums, such as news groups, mail list discussions and web forums, trimming and bottom-posting (or middle-posting) is the way to go. There are usually several threads active at a time, and threads can be forked and broken and carried on for weeks and months. It is very rare that a reply will be in response to every point that the parent made. In these cases, it's essential to give some reference so the reader knows what part of the discussion your comments apply to. Thus, a terse, trimmed "reference" quote is suitable.
The two styles are the difference between:
"These are my comments. (And by the way, this is the preceeding conversation, in case you forgot what we were discussing)"
...and...
"Somebody said this; to which I would like to add the following comments".
Most people will never post to a newsgroup or discussion board. They will live safe and secure in their top-posting world. It is only when they take a step into our world that there is an issue, and they need a quick and painless heads-up that different rules apply when posting to a multi-user discussion, and that they'd better learn to trim and bottom post if they want to stay :P
Sure, they can identify when it sounds wrong.
:)
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it 'sounds wrong relative to a set of rules'. It could mean 'sounds counterintuitive'.
I came to this conclusion after many very animated conversations with a Japanese friend who had *extremely* bad English.
I found myself listening to him and making perfect sense out of what he was saying, and then realising that the utterances which came out of his mouth had more-or-less no connection with what the grammar of the English language is supposed to be.
I didn't understand him through a rule-based grammar; I understood by intuiting his meaning from a wide variety of things; context, bodylanguage etc.
When two people have a conversation, there is a LOT going on. Linguists refer to this sort of thing as 'metalinguistic' and it tends to get written off as cruft.
Linguistics has no way to cope with things like tone, intensity, amplitude and so forth (except when they are phonemic as in tonal languages).
Yet in my experience, these factors are even more important than the order in which words are spoken, for example.
In flowing conversation, people say things, change their minds and say them again, say words out of order and all sorts of wierd and whacky things.
Yet it makes sense, more or less. People cope with free flowing speech very well. Even with free flowing writing (to an extent; James Joyce Ulyses (sp?) comes to mind).
Its only in (what were once) extraordinary situations (like talking to someone you can't see or can't hear properly) that the 'rules of grammar' become important.
Today, this sort of communication is more common hence it has become more important to us to develop 'rules of grammar'.
But I believe that speech is independent of grammar and that grammar is a relatively modern invention.
Thats a start, anyway
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
In the same way as your examples, dependent clauses normally take a placement that makes it easy to see what they depend on. (There, I broke a rule, rather than write "that on which they depend", which would sound stilted and archaic, but nicely Latinate).
Ending with a preposition often indicates a verb phrase was used where a noun would suffice. Much writing can be improved by reducing each sentence to the basic concepts. Start by removing "that", "which", and all prepositions; then rebuild the sentence adding as few words as possible. Do not be afraid to change words' "parts of speech".
You could have replaced the phrase with a noun, improving the grammar and making it more concise. You almost fixed it when you realized the phrase could have been the noun phrase "that on which they depend", which can be shortened to the single word "dependencies". In reverse, "take a placement" can be replaced by "placed".
Like your examples, dependent clauses are normally placed to see their dependencies easily.
[I prefer to split the infinitive ("to easily see"), but that would be dangerous in this forum.]
--- Advanced editing
After editing each sentence for conciseness, remove all conjunctions. Then add just enough connectors to make each paragraph make sense. Add paragraph breaks to group the sentences properly.
I tend to write very long sentences. Each sentence should contain only one thought. This process greatly improves readability.
Compare to:
After editing each sentence for conciseness, remove all conjunctions, then add just enough connectors to make each paragraph make sense, and add paragraph breaks to group the sentences properly. I tend to write very long sentences, although each sentence should contain only one thought, but this process greatly improves readability.
---
I spend so much time writing and talking professionally for work, my last girlfriend was surprised by my speech patterns when a vacation allowed me to revert to "normal".
I wonder if usage of the "Preview" button for posts to this article is greatly above the norm.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I want to see what the new text first so I can then judge what to do with the rest of it. If it's something I wrote myself then I may just skim it to remind myself what I told the person before. If it's a request for action then I want to know that's what it is. I only care about what's quoted if it's useful to the job at hand.
As for long "tails" well I usually don't get e-mail which has passed through more than 3 replys at most, and I find it takes a bloody lot of text to make any serious dent in my bandwidth, but it is nice to have a record of what you have or have not said simply because otherwise it can be hard to remember.
I'm an independent film producer. For my latest shoot I placed an ad on Craig's List. Here's a reply I got:
"hello, i am a freelance makeup artist who is also a film student. i have worked on many productions in the philadelphia area including film, video, commercial, print etc.. i would love to work on your project. give ma a call @ 267-nnn-nnnn. thank you
Christy McCabe"
My reply:
"Hello,
I appreciate your interest in Dangerous Movies. We're hip, we're independent and we're unconventional. We have no confidence, however, in people who do not know enough to use proper grammar in business correspondence. The rules for capitalization have not been repealed. And it's obvious you did not proofread your email before sending it out. If you're that careless in trying to get the gig, how careful are you going to be on the job?
I hope you accept this advice in the spirit in which it was given: not to put you down, but to educate you."
Her reply to my reply:
"you are a complete asshole. it is common knowledge that when sending an e mail, all rules of capitalization are thrown out the window. thank you for saving me from having to work on a shitty movie with a bunch of pompous assholes such as yourself. i hope your movie never makes any money.
fuck off."
I'm afraid Miss McCabe's attitude is not unusual among young people these days. She's not merely ignorant. She's indignant when someone is kind enough to try to help her out. Not to mention vulgar and hateful.
Insert witty sig here.
In reading the posts here, I see a lot of misplaced punctuation. When using quotation marks, the punctuation goes inside the quotes as in "here." The following example is improperly punctuated and logically incorrect.
Grammar Nanny #37
signature pending slashdot approval
Has anyone who holds a tech position and who can write well ever been hired because of that ability, or gotten a better starting salary because of it? I haven't. I write like Samuel Johnson as restrained by Strunk and White. I do not misspell or make punctuation errors. Compound-complex sentences and the subjunctive hold no terrors for me. This has all been useful to me in my work in various ways but I have never been specifically rewarded for it, as I have for being a long-term *nix admin, or having an MCSE, or being able to run a Fluke meter. If companies are distraught because their staff is illiterate let them pay a premium for literate new hires, or quit pissing and moaning. If the day ever comes when teachers can say "Kids, if you pay attention in English class your starting salary at Oracle goes up $5000," that might have some effect.
I'm working for a american company based in europe (we have english classes at school, but they are minimal!!). All the 'important' communications have to be in english and sometimes it gets far beyond the point of sanity.
My favourites are when local sayings are translated directly into english like;
- some of the slides i will walk faster through (during a powerpoint presentation)
- the server is _sitting_ in that room
- we have to keep our heads stiff!
- we have to watch our passes down the road
like any english speaking person will ever understand what they are talking about.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
What a timely article! No sooner had I read this on Slashdot than I receive the following email.
The background: I have a somewhat unusual background of an engineering education prior to entering medical school, and I've written on the Web a few articles for engineering students interested in pursuing medicine as a career. In these articles, I encourage readers to contact me with questions, and even though it has been a few years now, requests continue to come in regularly.
This is not the only email I've received that sounds like this:
> i read u r artical in information on medical.
> pl let me know in which college/universities is engineering along with medical is avialable like
> in university of western ontorio.so that if we dont get admission in medical we can continue in
> engineering.
> with engineering is good for females both monetary and job satisfation.
[name withheld]
My first thought was: "You gotta be kidding me." My reply:
--(start)--
You will not get into medical school.
Your sloppily written email to me reveals that you have failed to bother with any modicum of care in writing your request.
First, your English is bad. There are parts I still don't understand, such as "with engineering is good for females both monetary and job satisfation". What is that supposed to mean? Women will be attracted to you if you become an engineer?
While you might simply blame it on a lack of skill with English, it is clearly more than this. You make mistakes with something as straightforward as the name of the university. Who do you think you will impress with an essay entitled Why I Should Be Accepted To "university of western ontorio"? Are you not aware that the word "I" is capitalized in English? That "u r" is not a substitute for "you are"? (This in any case is incorrect usage, since it should be "your", not "you're" or "you are", and certainly not "u r".)
You've read my article on entering medicine, an article freely available to you that I posted at my own expense of time and effort. Having presumably benefitted from my free advice, you now seek further free advice from me. Can you not show me some basic respect by putting some thought into compsing your email? Can you not even be bothered to press the "Shift" key when you type the word "I"?
If all this is really due to ignorance, then you lack the basic learning capacity to function in medical school. If this is due to sloth, then all the worse --you may possibly have the potential, but you certainly haven't the attitude.
Please save yourself and others a great deal of effort by turning your endeavours to other fields. Thank you.
Even in answering your question, I've wasted more than you deserve. To compensate, I'm going to post your missive, and my reply, on the Web so that I will not be bothered by others like you.
--(end)--
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]