I had English teachers, while I grew up in the South Dakota Public School system, who truly cared about how we wrote! All of those boring lessons are a BIG blessing in my life now!!
Of course, it just about drives me crazy to see poor writing. "I seen him do it." "He don't do it right!" "Everybody done a good job." "He sure ain't a good writer." "Are children write good don't they?" NO, THEY DON'T!!
This is something that has troubled me for decades! Grammar errors on business billboards especially bug me. There are endless examples of this from unbelievable deals to eating the cook.
So I get discouraged with how seldom people even notice the decay of the English language all around us. I even get a little lazy, now that I do texting, but it nags at me that I know better than that.
I keep wishing that there was something I could do to help people with their writing skills. I am a teacher, after all, but who could teach the whole country?
This morning, as I watched my favorite news show on Facebook, I was appalled at the total disregard for grammar in the written comments of the other viewers. There were so many writing mistakes that my stomach started churning.
"THERE MUST BE SOMETHING THAT I CAN DO ABOUT THIS," I thought. So I went to Goggle and typed in something about how to repair terrible writing. This article came up and, seeing as it is well-written, I decided to share it with you all. At the very least, I was comforted in knowing that MANY others suffer right along with me as we wonder "What ever happened to grammar lessons?"
Mr. Bernoff has written a book on how to write better for greater business success! In this article, he shares some information about how poor writing has financial ramifications! I had never considered this aspect of the problem. Now I can see that our poor writing epidemic is an even BIGGER disaster than I had realized!
I like Mr. Bernoff's simple suggestions for how to improve our writing skills. I share them with the hopes that I have caused no offense where it was not needed. However, if you find that the shoe fits, I hope that you will calmly take a few hints from this article and improve your writing skills. The world will thank you for it and you may just find yourself moving forward in the business world!
Hats off to English teachers who still teach writing!
Dawn
PS. I'm thinking of buying his book, "Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean" if for no other reason than to raise eyebrows when people see it on my book shelf. On the other hand, I just may learn some things which will help my business grow. HMMMMM
Bad Writing Costs Businesses Billions
It’s not just a chore to wade through the badly written memos, emails, and other lousy business communication—this inefficiency costs us insane amounts of money.
There is a fundamental inefficiency at the heart of American business. It is right in front of all of our faces, and yet we fail to recognize it.
It’s the fuzzy, terrible writing we slog through every day at work. And it’s costing American businesses nearly $400 billion every year.
Think about it. You start your day wading through first-draft emails from colleagues who fail to come to the point. You consume reports that don’t make clear what’s happening or what your management should do about it.
The websites, marketing materials, and press releases from your suppliers are filled with jargon and meaningless superlatives. This problem is as common as rust, and just as welcome; in my survey of businesspeople who write at work, 81 percent agreed with the statement: “Poorly written material wastes a lot of my time.”
Poor writing creates a drag on everything you do. It functions like a tax, sapping your profits, and I can quantify it. American workers spend 22 percent of their work time reading; higher compensated workers read more.
According to my analysis, America is spending 6 percent of total wages on time wasted attempting to get meaning out of poorly written material. Every company, every manager, every professional pays this tax, which consumes $396 billion of our national income. That’s more than half of what we pay for Medicare—but the poor writing tax pays for nothing but waste.
We’re so immersed in this stuff that we hardly notice it any more. I’m talking about job descriptions like this one, from a health care company:
“The Area Vice President, Enterprise Customers will develop and manage a sustainable strategic relationship that transforms the current commercial model by creating joint value that results in the ongoing reduction of costs, continuous process improvement, growth and profitability for both partners with the ability to export key learnings.”
How much time did the HR department and the job candidates waste trying to figure that out?
How about the lede from ++ Samsung’s recent statement ++ [https://news.samsung.com/global/statement-on-galaxy-note7] about its smartphones?
“Samsung is committed to producing the highest quality products and we take every incident report from our valued customers very seriously. In response to recently reported cases of the new Galaxy Note7, we conducted a thorough investigation and found a battery cell issue.”
Battery cell issue? The phones are catching on fire—but you’d never know it from the company’s statement, which mentions only “incidents.” Say what you mean.
Of all the serious problems in the American workplace, this one is the most solvable. And we can solve it one company, one culture, one worker at a time.
The first step is to adopt what I call “The Iron Imperative” in everything you write: treat the reader’s time as more valuable than your own.
To embrace it means that every time you send an email or write a document, you must take a moment to structure it for maximum readability and meaning. We are lazy; we’d rather save our own time than someone else’s. But writers who adopt The Iron Imperative stand out in the workplace for clarity and efficiency, and are more likely to get ahead. Workplace cultures that adopt it will reduce their poor writing tax.
Josh Bernoff has been a professional writer for more than 30 years, including two decades as a well-known technology analyst. He is the coauthor of three books on business strategy, and his new book from HarperBusiness is Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean.
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