With our new technologies, twitter, facebook, text messaging, we have learned to cherish the shortest messages, and while the increasing value of the clear and concise 160 character message has improved our ability to communicate quickly, it hasn't helped our ability to communicate substantively.
We are losing the art of the paragraph.
Why does writing well matter? So much of grammar seems arbitrary, annoying, and irrelevant to communication.
The real reason correct and clear writing matters is credibility.
A few years ago, I was visiting friends in Germany. One of them is an English teacher and she asked me if I could explain to her the difference between "fill in" and "fill out". She gave an example, "Would you say 'I want to fill in the form'? or 'I want to fill out the form'?" I tried to imagine the situation. At the doctor or dentist's office, they hand you that clipboard with all the info you have to verify and say, "Please fill out the form." Ok, so "fill out", but "fill in" sounded just as right. On a test, it might say "Fill in all the blanks." So, I decided that the difference had to do with what was expected from the writer. To "fill out" seems to be to put in all the necessary information--to complete a form or provide information. To "fill in" seems to be to put back what has been taken out or removed. If there are obvious gaps in something, you fill them in. But if there are gaps and you need not complete all of them, you fill them out. Thoughts?
Read MoreA cover letter is a document that pretty much all of us have to write. It's that thing that goes with your resume, a letter required by your potential employers. But what is the purpose of this letter? Your resume should tell the employer everything they need to know: where you went school, where you've worked, what responsibilities you've had, how long you've been at a job or in school, what your computer skills are, etc. What else do these people need from you?
Read MorePrior to the prevalence of computers, (misspelling was the most common writing error. But spellcheck solved that problem and, like so many of our best inventions, created a new one: the word choice error. Now, our greatest problem is having a computer choose our words for us and, occasionally, choose incorrectly. Here are three of my favorite irreverent errors.
Read MoreI'm not sure if it's the happy and optimistic millenials flooding the job market or the newest generation of students who feel entitled to everything and expect rich praise for even the most basic of tasks, but I've noticed a serious increase in the use of "Thanks" in business writing.
Read MoreFathers' Day was this past week, so I was confronted with the challenges of the plural and possessive s all over my facebook feed and the Walgreen's card section. A friend asked, "Is it s apostrophe or apostrophe s?" Well, I supposed, like so many grammar issues, that depends.
Read MoreIn my seminars recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about tone. People feel that they themselves or others are too “abrupt” or “brusque” in email. This is not uncommon.
The problem exists because writing is a much more limited system than our other forms of communication. When we talk to people face-to-face, we interpret their body language, gestures, facial expressions as part of what they are saying. When we talk on the phone, we lose the body, but we still have the voice with all its inflection, tone, and volume.
Today, a seminar participant wrote on his feedback form: "This seminar took writing, which seems complicated and difficult, and made it really simple: plan, write, revise.
Some people are afraid of the blank page. Planning gets those writers started so that they are never faced with a blank page. The page has, at a minimum, their responses to the planning prompts.
I'm not sure if I've gotten a reputation as the instructor who likes grammar jokes, but another student kindly sent me more grammar jokes.
Read MoreA student proudly showed me these jokes last week, so excited that he had found something relevant that I might think was entertaining. They're from McSweeney's and the list by Eric Auld is called "Seven Bar Jokes Involving Grammar and Punctuation."
Read MoreWhile teaching a business writing seminar last week, I decided to start our punctuation section with a simple list:
Read MoreI’m preparing to conduct my first business writing seminar, and I’m a little nervous. Sure, I’ve taught business writing for a while, but I’ve been focusing my teaching efforts on college students for so long that what I’m nervous about is tailoring the material to people who actually know what writing for work is like.
Read MoreA few semesters ago, I had an out of town engagement on the first day of class, so I sent an email to all my future students introducing myself and giving them a writing assignment to work on before the “second” day of class. The majority of students answered my questions eloquently, used correct format for an email to an unknown superior, and generally impressed me with the writing skills they would be bringing to our class. However, not all of them exceeded my expectations.
Read MoreOne of my students recently sent me this article:
Read MoreRecently, I’ve been reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The ideas in it are fascinating. Basically, a habit is a routine that happens in response to a particular cue and leads to a particular reward. Habits are shortcuts for our brain, ways of transforming everyday tasks into automatic ones. In Duhigg’s book, he explains how it works and how certain people and companies have used this built-in system to improve or create new habits.
Read More“Formal” means having form, relying on conventions, following established etiquette. It is not a synonym of nonsense, complicated, thesaurus-like.
Read MoreOne of the biggest challenges with written language is communicating our ideas effectively to a reader who is not present. When the message is accurately transmitted, written language is amazing. But when the message is inaccurately transmitted, fury encourages us to blame the other person, writer or reader, for the mistake.
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