Office workers fall short when building a sentence

 

By Sam Dillon

The New York Times
Wednesday, December 8, 2004

 
BLOOMINGTON, Illinois: Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an 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"

 

Hogan receives hundreds of e-mails monthly from managers and executives seeking to improve their writing or their workers' writing. He says the number 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," 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 major U.S. companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. The College Board is a U.S. organization that helps students going to college.

 

The problem with writing shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said.

 

"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 Applera, a California company that makes 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."

 

"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."

 

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.

 

For example, an e-mail from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation in Palo Alto, California, said, "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'." That message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training.

 

About $2.9 billion of the $3.1 billion the National Commission on Writing estimates that companies spend a year on remedial training is for current employees, with the rest spent on new hires.

 

The corporations surveyed were limited to the mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, finance, insurance, real estate and service industries, the commission said. Nor did the estimate include spending by government agencies to improve the writing of public servants.

 

An entire education 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 former legal proofreader who teaches business writing at the University of California Extension in Santa Cruz, said she sought to dissuade students from sending business memos in the crude shorthand they learned to tap out on 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 respon. thanking u for ur cooperation."

 

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

 

Even chief executives need writing help, Roger Peterson, a freelance writer in Rocklin, California, who frequently coaches executives, said.

 

"Many of these guys write in inflated language that desperately needs a laxative," 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 Peterson to help them improve. Don Morrison, a former auditor at Deloitte & Touche who has built a successful consulting business, is among them.

 

"I was too wordy," 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 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 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," Andrews 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," she said. "I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life."

 

Hogan, who founded his online Business Writing Center a decade ago after years of teaching composition at Illinois State University, 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.

 

"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," Hogan said. "It has companies at their wits' end."

 

 

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