Decline of Writing Skills

* Re “Full of Information, Free of Ideas,” Opinion, Oct. 10:

If Richard Rodriguez is correct and writing skills are not necessary for “job success,” then why do we hear so many business leaders constantly bemoan the poor quality of employee writing skills? Why are they also the ones who push for educational reforms to improve literacy standards? Do they just like to hear themselves complain? Or do they know something Rodriguez does not--namely, that writing and communicating effectively are still the keys to success in most business enterprises?

DENNIS M. CLAUSEN

Escondido

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* I was struck by Rodriguez’s quote from the headmaster at a prep school: “The future may demand minds less self-reflective.” I think of the increasing prevalence of jobs that require the constant input of information at computer terminals. How many people can sit and think about what they are doing as they input word after word or number after number? We chase information and keep entering the data, but we can’t reflect on what all of it means. We go from link to link on Web pages. We listen to sound bites on radio and television. All of us grab the pieces as they are thrown at us, but we can’t put the puzzle together.

This is our culture. This is our way of life. Survival in the Information Age. And those who stop to think are left behind in the tangle of endless wires and the drone of constant signals.

MARY J. JOHNSON

Orange

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* Fewer people capable of expressing their shallow ideas in writing meshes neatly with the growing number of illiterates in our society. Add to this situation more and more people talking constantly on cell phones, and there you have the new “babble on.”

ULA PENDLETON

Los Angeles