14 Nov Writing: Is it Sabotaging your Business?
A threat to many organizations is operating in plain sight. Day after day this insidious enemy is at work. Every department might be harboring this traitor – yet no-one seems to notice!
What is this threat to business success?
Bad writing.
An informal study of people who have noticed writing errors in documents produced by companies with which they do business has yielded some of the following reactions:
– People in that company are stupid.
– They don’t pay attention to details.
– They aren’t careful in what they do.
– Whoever is managing that company isn’t doing a very good job.
And the worst:
- I think I’ll deal with someone else.
Writing is something we all do at one time or another in our jobs. Most of us learned writing basics in early elementary school, and many people added some sophistication and depth to their skills in high school. But some people didn’t have the gift of writing instruction, and others have forgotten much of what they learned, and still others don’t believe that it matters much how they write.
So many ways to demonstrate a lack of command of the language: grammatical goofs, weird sentence structure, non-sentences disguised as sentences, meaningless modifiers, made-up spelling. It seems endless. And perhaps it seems heartless to judge a perfectly good operation by the errors of a few, but there you are.
Naturally, we at Language at Work would like to help. Shall we talk about writing coaching for the shy and busy, or classes for everyone else? Give us a call at: 202-298-7700
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