Dere Valeud Client . . .
Their, there or they’re? That or which? Its or it’s? Does the period go before or after the quotation mark? Is it congratulations or congradulations?
Such common writing questions aren’t just stumping elementary and high school students. These days, engineers, physicians and business managers are popping a sweat over spelling and grammar. And students are graduating from college and entering the work force without knowing basic writing skills, experts say.
“From construction workers to environmental engineers, writing is a real problem,” said JoAnn Byrne, who teaches business writing and communication at Cal State Fullerton. “And it’s because nobody reads. So they don’t know how to spell and they don’t have a good working vocabulary. We really have to get on top of this.”
To better boost skills, local colleges and universities are offering writing classes for all students--not just liberal arts majors.
And on the other end, companies are hiring consultants to teach their employees how to be better writers. Problems range from simple grammatical mistakes to major sentence structure errors.
There’s a big need.
One of Byrne’s business students wrote a letter for class that read, “The question are, ‘Am I ready for the workplace?’ I think I do.’ ”
Wrote another: “In regarding to you application, we are unabled to approve your promotion.”
And she found a professional misspelled his own company’s name once and the word “document” numerous times in a formal business letter.
The writer also capitalized the words “Business Reply” and “Firm”--for no grammatical reason.
“We have to start teaching writing for business,” Byrne said, “Or the bosses are going to go nuts and the CEOs are going to go crazy.”
For some companies, the problems are not as extreme. The employees may know how to write a simple letter or e-mail, but all they lack is confidence.
Business managers freeze when their bosses tell them to write a persuasive memo about a new product. Scientists’ hearts start beating faster when they have to work with words instead of formulas. And engineers break into the sweats at the words “written proposal” and “oral presentation.”
“Management tends to complain a lot that new people coming in don’t know how to write,” said Hugh Marsh, a UC Santa Barbara lecturer and an independent consultant. “But a lot of it is fear. Most people are afraid of it.”
Lack of Confidence Can Be Problem
Many business managers, accountants and physicians are particularly afraid to write because their professions emphasize numbers over words, writing consultants say. At the beginning of Byrne’s workshops, she asks how many people are truly confident about their writing. Out of classes of about 25 or 30 students, usually one or two people raise their hands.
“Subconsciously, everyone knows that they are not well prepared, and the fact they can’t do it scares the heck out of them,” Byrne said.
One of her professional students turned down a promotion offer seven times because she feared that upper management would discover her poor writing skills.
Consultants like Marsh and Byrne charge anywhere from $75 to $200 per hour for an on-site workshop. They also coach professionals one-on-one for a little bit more.
For the money, they teach classes in speed-reading, spelling and grammar, technical writing, report and memo writing and proofreading. Often, teachers will review writing samples and meet with employees beforehand so they can customize the courses.
They also teach employees how to write memos, formal letters, reports and e-mails. They show workers how to write persuasively, clearly and directly. They remind them to avoid jargon and to be conversational.
They advise them when to write a formal letter versus an e-mail, and how to do both quickly. And they urge students to refer to their grammar guides and dictionaries, rather than relying on computer spelling or grammar checks.
Spell check, consultants say, can be a writer’s ruin. The writer may spell “your” correctly, but should have written “you’re.” And when given a choice of different words, such as “stationary” or “stationery,” or “loose” or “lose,” the person may choose the wrong one.
“Your readers need to know exactly what you mean, and they need to know it right away--up front,” Marsh wrote in his book, “The Quick-Look Guide to Business Writing Style.”
“Business documents are not mystery stories with clues buried here and there, with the meaning finally revealed at the end,” he wrote.
If employees have marginal writing skills or never learned to write in the first place, consultants know they can’t bring them up to speed in one day.
Whatever the reason, writing coaches say the literature of commerce is littered with clunkers. Some examples from actual business letters and memos:
* The automatic call distributor is important because when all the telephone lines are busy, it will put customers on hold and provide ‘gentile’ music;
* The road which has brought me before you as a psychologist began while a student as East Los Angeles Community College;
* The DMR Channel is usually characterized by a slowly time-varying, frequency-selective multipath-fading channel model.
“These long strings of adjectives really make engineering writing so difficult to read,” Marsh said in an interview.
But for many companies, the courses are more of a review.
Patagonia, an outdoor clothing and equipment maker, hired a consultant to work with employees during a four-month period on writing more concisely and logically.
“It is important in general to be able to communicate clearly and effectively,” said Jennifer Van Homer, human resources manager at Ventura-based Patagonia. “People could really spend a lot of time trying to figure out something that could have taken one quick e-mail.”
Raytheon Systems Co. in Santa Barbara hired a consultant to conduct a one-day writing seminar. Human resources manager Belinda Smith said many Raytheon employees needed to brush up on sentence and paragraph structure.
“You get out of touch, and kind of forget,” Smith said. “And we want our employees to write to the point, without being wordy.”
Jamie Sloan, a programmer at Raytheon, said the course helped her write shorter and more direct e-mails.
“For me it was kind of a refresher course,” she said. “I felt my writing skills were pretty good, but there was definitely room for improvement.”
A Deluge of Information
Workers in all fields need to have sharper reading and writing skills than ever before, experts say. That is in part because of the explosion of the Internet and e-mail, they say. Scientists and business managers are deluged with online information, and have to read and translate that information quickly.
In the past, companies may have only distributed technical reports to other scientists. But now, companies may post those same reports on the Internet for the public.
“The people in the corner of the lab used to be left alone, but now the demands are different for these people,” said LeeAnne Kryder, a UC Santa Barbara lecturer who has taught writing classes at hospitals and city offices. “Writing and communicating have now become a part of their work.”
Workers might also have to complete online employee evaluations or update their bosses on a project via e-mail. And because e-mail is so informal, consultants say, people get very careless with spelling and grammar. They write run-on sentences and sentence fragments, and rarely proofread.
Those sloppy e-mails can reflect poorly on a company, managers say. “I’m accused of being nit-picky,” said Dan Masnada, executive director of the Central Coast Water Authority. “But when I see something that is grammatically incorrect, I’ll fix it.”
Masnada hired a consultant to teach his agency’s managers how to write more effective evaluations of employees. He also sent some employees to outside classes in technical writing.
Better writing skills, say the experts, will make employees more competitive in the workplace, and may even lead the way to promotions.
“Our future in every discipline depends on the ability to communicate,” Marsh said. “If you can write and you can speak, you are going to make more money in this age of information.”
Have any examples of bad writing at your workplace? Send us copies of those muddled or misspelled memos for a follow-up story. Mail to Editor of the Reading Page, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.
