The importance of good writing skills

People judge you by your presence - how you dress, how you speak, your body language, your writing. Being sharp in these areas tends to give the perception you have your act together. Being sloppy or too casual, maybe not so bright, motivated, etc.

 

Dear GG,

Corporations, government agencies and schools are overly staffed with educated workers who can not effectively communicate using the written word. They lack the knowledge, experience and time to convey words in a meaningful, constructive manner to express their thoughts. In my opinion, the power and imagery of the written word is lost to precise to-the-point social blogs, tweets, text messages and a few emails that masquerade as thoughtful prose.

People who don't make the time to write have no advantage over those who can't write. (aplogies to Mark Twain)

 

This is a problem that has been growing inexorably in the last few decades, the speed of which only increases with the adoption of technology that allows us to "communicate" quickly, but reduces the substance of those messages, and ergo reduces the quality of that communication.

E-mail sped up the trend, then was given a huge boost with the advent of "texting" and now followed by the ridiculous "twitter". Can you imagine, Shakespeare in 140 characters? "2 B r not 2 b,,,,,"

You see this trend in all manner of life, including I might add with the calibre of some posters here. Because the writing is often so bad, it is seems to be no wonder that some people don't understand basic social, political and economic concepts. If you write badly, it is likely that you read badly.

Icarus

PS I plead guilty to writing quite often on an IPad. I notice right away, the quality ( and readability) of my writing on the IPad is demonstrably worse!

 

I am always amazed, even more each year, in the declining writing skills of the young engineers in our workplace. I have to continually play grammar cop in correcting their reports. Some of these reports end up in some high places.

I agree that the computer keyboard, then email and now facebook and twitter have added to this decline. I would hate to see these people have to actually write a report by hand.

I am fortunate that my wife has always been an English cop to our kids growing up. To this day my kids know better than to send either of us an email, text message or facebook message that is not written properly

 

Not only does bad writing project a poor appearance, it also diminishes communication. Sometimes people think I am being pedantic when in actuality all I am trying to do is make sense out of garbled words. It isn't so much about writing being pretty; it's about writing being clear.

As an engineer, what would happen if I tossed around numbers and units with the same cavalier attitude as many do with words? Things would break and people would die.

At its core, it's simply a matter of being a good craftsman. If words are your tools, use them with some precision.

Tom

 

You might send instructions to a rocket motor in lbf when you meant N. Oh wait a minute....

You guys wouldn't believe some of the resumes I see for two engineering openings I have. Everyone should always get another person to review his/her own resume....only particularly so if English is not your mother tongue.

 

So you're a Government worker? Isn't that an oxymoron?

 

Oouch...that's exactly what I wanted to write, but didn't have courage, nor stoutness of heart to say that to Rae Vynn, most senior of PriusChatters and grammar goddess of all that is of literary worth...but thanks for saying what I was thinking!

 

My father would say that 'work' is something you do not want to do. Rae meant that the government sends her a paycheck

 

Unless one is prepared to not drive on public roads, send their kids to public schools, don't care about inspected meat, don't care about the efficacy of their medicine, don't care about clean air or water, don't care to have the fire dept come when their house is on fire, or the police come when they are broken into, don't care if the insurance company isn't going to cheat themo out of paying a claim, don't care if airplanes aare flown safely, etc, etc, etc, then one should carefully consider the above posts!

Icarus

 

I have considered them carefully and stand by them lol :mod:

 

Well, as a hater of the words 'republican' and 'libertarian', I fill at liberty to argue with you, Icarus

Government in my view has a solid positive influence in mandating business transparency and taxing externalized costs. Arguably a good idea is socialized infrastructure such as basic science research, rail, fire, education, and defense.

The rest is varying degrees of corrupted, horribly inefficent bureaucratic idiocy.
Rae's OP is a good example: government to help with spelling !?

 

twarnt to hep wit spellin, tware to determine if the bidness being enkuired about was a douchebag company or whther they were jest good gies with an illiterate sending out emales.

 

^^ to fuhnee ... ... but spaleing illiterate rong ... ... reks you'r mezg.

 

She is also a witch. I would recommend paying close attention to any new symptoms for the next couple of days.

Tom

 

Stagebush, thnks four the hep. I lookd that wrd up and eye did mispill it. Thuh dicktunerry says the wurd eye ment is spilled "illegitimate", knot illiterate.

Spillin r emportand:rockon:

 

lol, oh yeah.

She know's I'm joking (at least I hope she does) and is of good enough character to rise above my childish comments.

 

I've been on the "Interweb" since before the web part (WWW) even existed. FTP, dialup BBS's, Genie and CompuServe were about it and a 1200 baud modem WAS fast. I can honestly say everyone was very good about presenting themselves as best they could in their written word. Back then there were not a lot of non-technical people participating and those that could not be understood were completely ignored. It stayed that way until some of the text based communication services came into being and charged by the character sent. It wasn't long after that when things began to degrade. Leetspeak (1337) started it and big time texting apps really sent it downhill rapidly after that.

It sickened me then and still does now to participate on an International "English based" forum where the non-native English writers are much easier to understand than the native English writers. I always felt that if they could go to the effort to be understood that we should return the favor if at least for their benefit.

I never thought typing like e. e. cummings was as cool as some seem to think it is.