The Illiteracy of Corporate American E-Mail

Dave writes "There is a pretty amusing/sad article about functional illiteracy when it comes to professional e-mails. Some of the samples are just ridiculous."

Saw a similar article on the BBC a few days ago

[boringgit]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4059077.stm

Takes a different tach - in this case it points out quite how bad emails can be in a corporate environment.

From irritating, to rude - often without meaning to be...

Sometimes I am glad to be employed in shipping - characters cost - fewer are better ;)

Re:How they become?

[mordors9]

I work for a fairly large corporation and supervise a group of people. I used to think the spelling mistakes were just typing errors, that all of the grammatical mistakes and punctuation errors were just laziness. Don't get me wrong, I mistype words occasionally and I certainly do not always use perfect grammar. But, I see an awful lot of emails and reports that are nearly incomprehensible. I have also come to the conclusion that an awful lot of people really do not know how to spell or have a basic understanding of grammar. I guess further evidence that our public education system is failing miserably.

Have they ever heard of English as a 2nd language?

[updog]

"Considering how highly educated our people are, many can't write clearly in their day-to-day work."

The article doesn't once mention the possibility that the authors of some of these emails may not have learned English as their primary language. Here's a new flash for them: English is not the most widely spoken language in the world (Chinese is).

As we have more and more global influence in America's corporate workplace, we're going to see more and more people who have learned English as a 2nd language, which is probably the real reason why "corporate America can't build a sentence".

Language evolves...

[k4_pacific]

Get over it. Over time, the writers of this broken English will develop a sense of what sounds right and what doesn't and it will be a recognized dialect of English.

Perhaps this is just language becoming more efficient, closer to total information entropy.

Re:Not too suprising

[James_Duncan8181]

Amusingly "American's" should not have a commar as it is merely plural, not indicative of ownership.

I see this happen a lot with IMs...

[antdude]

I see this a lot with instant messaging. It's a lot worse there than e-mails from my experience at work and off work. It's pretty sad.

Re:How they become?

[BigBir3d]

F7 in MS Word is a beautiful thing. and my email clients always scan for spelling before sending. does not catch my grammar though. most emails i got at my old job from chinese and taiwanese people were more comprehensible than the ones from my idiot american customers. of course, with a 12 or 13 hour time difference the message had to be correct the first time.

i think this is why IM is becoming more used in the corporate world. so the idiot clones know what they are stating to each other.

of course i work for a $700M corporation that has had no network access for my branch for 6 calendar days. took 5 days forr the to figure out it may be the router. turns out the guy that did the un-install at the old location cut off all the cat5 cables with metal snips, while the router was still running. being a person of laziness (note lack of caps), why would someone cut them, just to unplug them later? the cable was to be thrown away in either case. i don't get it...

Re:How they become?

[untaken_name]

You know, it's hard to reconcile the obvious need for better, clearer written communication with the hatred of those of us who alert people to mistakes in that area. What you're saying is that you wish people would write more clearly and yet you don't want anyone to correct you when you do not. It's obvious that the problem is not the spelling/grammar nazis, it's the relative scarcity of them. I could correct the five mistakes I found while reading your comment; since you're scared of us, I will not. There may be more, but I saw no reason to look more closely when my help will obviously not be appreciated. Good luck in the business world, and have fun in your remedial English training.

Re:Time to ditch the English Language?

[eidechse]

Seriously. English is one of the hardest, most bastardized language in the world.

Agreed. The thing that really gets me though is that some of the bastardizations are the fault of grammarians themselves.

For example, two of the main things that get grammar folks screaming are ending sentences in prepositions and splitting infinitives... these aren't even real problems. Hell, there not even the result of English's polyglot roots. A few jerks about a century ago decided that English should conform to the Latin rules of grammar. Since the aformentioned two things can't happen in Latin it was decided that it must be wrong in English.

Having to keep track of the wacked out spelling "rules", a bunch of moods, and neat things like homophones is hard enough. No need to add artifical complexity as well.

Re:Huh?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Nope. "Ridiculous", which goes with the verb "ridicule" (to make fun of).

Man, if this were a spelling contest, you'd "loose"...

(I think there's a law that people sending information over the internet are forbidden from spelling "lose" properly, too, you see...).

Re:Have they ever heard of English as a 2nd langua

[myowntrueself]

"Newsflash 2: People who speak English as a second language are often better at correct grammar then native English-speakers."

Actually, that might be because native speakers of a language actually understand their *spoken* language at an intuitive level, whereas grammar and punctuation are, IMO, artifacts of education and written language; spoken language has *no* punctuation and (I believe) no grammar.

Therefore, people who receive a formal education in a language pick up the formalised rules intended to make it possible to write down what is, after all, primarily a verbal phenomenon.

ESL students are likely to do better at this than native speakers because by the time you get to school you will have picked up the intuitive and non-rule-bound understanding that makes spoken language possible and flexible.

(I've studied linguistics at university, only to stage 2 so I am not 100% ignorant. I just happen to disagree with such luminaries as Chomsky).

Again, Dijkstra said it best.

[devphil]

IMHO, if an engineer is imprecise in his language, in any medium, he will be imprecise in other more important areas.

Just a couple weeks ago this comment [slashdot.org] made sense, and hey, now it makes sense even more.

Grammer?

[Cybertect]

Perhaps it's just another Americanism, but over here in England we spell it 'grammar' :)

Re:How they become?

[Winkhorst]

A lot of this not-ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition and not-starting-a-sentence-with-a-conjunction nonsense goes back to a failed 17th Century attempt to fashion English grammar after that of Latin. For every one of these rules there is a perfectly correct example from before the period of False Latinization. This silliness must be distinguished from true grammatical errors involving constructions that make it difficult or impossible to understand what the writer is trying to say. That is the key point here. Language is about communication. If it doesn't communicate well, it is BAD language.

literacy of e-mail

[BCMcI]

If anyone reading this post sees his or her writing style I have a suggestion. Re-read and edit. Because e-mail is so quick and easy we tend to just dash it off and click send. If you read over what you have just read and think how it will sound to your recipient you will often be able to make changes to clarify what you are trying to get across.

Re:How they become?

[Trifthen]

Unfortunately, it's more pervasive than it sometimes seems. I work at a company that interacts extensively with newspapers and other content publishers in the industry. Just the people you'd think would have a firm grasp on grammar, spelling, and punctuation, right? I could easily post dozens of examples that would unquestionably trump those cited in the article.

Though I have to admit there's something funny when the publisher of a newspaper uses the chat shortcuts we've all become accustomed to. Sometimes we'll pass along the more amusing examples around the office, though usually when an email is especially incomprehensible. Often, I've been tempted to simply respond to customer requests with: "wtf?"

Re:Grammer?

[Winkhorst]

A grammer is someone who grinds flour. The word survives as a surname but does not appear in most dictionaries.

Re:Grammer?

[RealAlaskan]

Well, I spell it `grammar', too. I misspell it `grammer'. Consistantly, in that post. If you RTFA, you're probably not surprised.

Re:How they become?

[Martin Blank]

How you speak -- and write -- affects others' perceptions of you. When you write a report or an e-mail, you don't always know who will be reading it along the way. particularly in larger organizations. The county government for which I work has 16,000 employees, 14,000 of them with e-mail accounts. I see e-mails from other IT departments on a fairly routine basis, and some of them are simply painful to read. They may have aced their CCIE exam, but if I don't already know them then I may not take them to be so bright if they don't know basic grammar like where to capitalize and where to put periods and commas (overuse of which are probably the most common non-spelling error I see). Pretty much everyone is using Outlook 2002 or 2003, and the vast majority of them are using Word as their e-mail editor, so they really have little excuse as the checks are turned on by default.

I've offered to buy a couple of grammar manuals for the department, but no one seems to be interested, and no one with purchasing power will authorize it through normal channels.

Politics and the English Language

[gidds]

While I heartily agree with all the posters deploring the current state of English as she is typed, I think the problems are deeper than just spelling and grammar. While they are the most obvious problems -- the easiest to spot, criticise, and correct -- if people aren't thinking clearly, then no amount of elegant grammar and immaculate spelling will convert their muddled ideas into clear and direct text.

The author George Orwell wrote an article about this in 1945; I find it a very interesting read, and probably even more relevant today. (It seems remarkably prescient in many respects.) It's called Politics and the English Language, but don't let the title put you off: it's not about politics per se, just about how writers (mis)use English in various types of writing, political and otherwise.

It's online in many places, for example here [k-1.com] and here [commnet.edu]. Well worth a read.

Re:How they become?

[grangerg]

Or he could just ask "Which path leads to your village?"
Both people will point to the truth-tellers' village.

Re:"New York Times" is guilty too

[coreymichaelbarr]

The New York Times utilizes their own style manual with rather specific rules. It's most likely not an issue with a Microsoft product, but instead the paper following their own grammar rules. The manual is available here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812 963881/002-3543086-2126403?v=glance [amazon.com]