This Embarrasses You and I*
Grammar Gaffes Invade the Office
in an Age of Informal Email, Texting and Twitter
from the Wall Street Journal…..sent by Mark Waldeland:
When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, “There’s new people you should meet,” her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.
“I cringe every time I hear” people misuse “is” for “are,” Mr. Silver says. The company’s chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with “like.” For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. “I am losing the battle,” he says.
Employers say the grammar skills of people they hire are getting worse, a recent survey shows. But language is evolving so fast that old rules of usage are eroding. Sue Shellenbarger has details on Lunch Break. Illustration: John S. Dykes.
Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors, many managers say.
There’s no easy fix. Some bosses and co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult business-grammar guides for help. In a survey conducted earlier this year, about 45% of 430 employers said they were increasing employee-training programs to improve employees’ grammar and other skills, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and AARP.
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“I’m shocked at the rampant illiteracy” on Twitter, says Bryan A. Garner, author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage” and president of LawProse, a Dallas training and consulting firm. He has compiled a list of 30 examples of “uneducated English,” such as saying “I could care less,” instead of “I couldn’t care less,” or, “He expected Helen and I to help him,” instead of “Helen and me.”
Leslie Ferrier says she was aghast at letters employees were sending to customers at a Jersey City, N.J., hair- and skin-product marketer when she joined the firm in 2009. The letters included grammar and style mistakes and were written “as if they were speaking to a friend,” says Ms. Ferrier, a human-resources executive. She had employees use templates to eliminate mistakes and started training programs in business writing.
Most participants in the Society for Human Resource Management-AARP survey blame younger workers for the skills gap. Tamara Erickson, an author and consultant on generational issues, says the problem isn’t a lack of skill among 20- and 30-somethings. Accustomed to texting and social networking, “they’ve developed a new norm,” Ms. Erickson says.
At RescueTime, for example, grammar rules have never come up. At the Seattle-based maker of personal-productivity software, most employees are in their 30s. Sincerity and clarity expressed in “140 characters and sound bytes” are seen as hallmarks of good communication—not “the king’s grammar,” says Jason Grimes, 38, vice president of product marketing. “Those who can be sincere, and still text and Twitter and communicate on Facebook—those are the ones who are going to succeed.”
Also, some grammar rules aren’t clear, leaving plenty of room for disagreement. Tom Kamenick battled fellow attorneys at a Milwaukee, Wis., public-interest law firm over use of “the Oxford comma”—an additional comma placed before the “and” or “or” in a series of nouns. Leaving it out can change the meaning of a sentence, Mr. Kamenick says: The sentence, “The greatest influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey and Madonna,” means something different from the sentence, “The greatest influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey, and Madonna,” he says. (The first sentence implies the writer has two celebrity sisters; the second says the sisters and the stars are different individuals.) After Mr. Kamenick asserted in digital edits of briefs and papers that “I was willing to go to war on that one,” he says, colleagues backed down, either because they were convinced, or “for the sake of their own sanity and workplace decorum.”
Patricia T. O’Conner, author of a humorous guidebook for people who struggle with grammar, fields workplace disputes on a blog she cowrites, Grammarphobia. “These disagreements can get pretty contentious,” Ms. O’Conner says. One employee complained that his boss ordered him to make a memo read, “for John and I,” rather than the correct usage, “for John and me,” Ms. O’Conner says.
In workplace-training programs run by Jack Appleman, a Monroe, N.Y., corporate writing instructor, “people are banging the table,” yelling or high-fiving each other during grammar contests he stages, he says. “People get passionate about grammar,” says Mr. Appleman, author of a book on business writing.
Christopher Telano, chief internal auditor at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., has employees circulate their reports to co-workers to review for accuracy and grammar, he says. He coaches auditors to use action verbs such as “verify” and “confirm” and tells them to write below a 12th-grade reading level so it can be easily understood.
Mr. Garner, the usage expert, requires all job applicants at his nine-employee firm—including people who just want to pack boxes—to pass spelling and grammar tests before he will hire them. And he requires employees to have at least two other people copy-edit and make corrections to every important email and letter that goes out.
“Twenty-five years ago it was impossible to put your hands on something that hadn’t been professionally copy-edited,” Mr. Garner says. “Today, it is actually hard to put your hands on something that has been professionally copy-edited.”
Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com
Comment: So they blame it on twitter and facebook. Even at the Wall Street Journal!
Bull! It is the price education, worse- society pays for living in a feminized world where feelings rather than structure and order overwhelm everything including learnings and common sense.
We live in Obamaland school neighborhoods, where these lefties push for unilavatories and everything ‘equal’ (except for the Obamas who always take a bigger share of the pie…..and allow the human female to be more equal than anyone else in order to buy her vote. The Left controls the schools which control the language, which control the culture..
I shop at a slightly uppity super market and have so for more than 40 years. There was a time when children ages three to twelve didn’t grab the merchandise they didn’t have any intention of buying. Since the American Institutional Left has elevated the human female to goddess levels over the past 35 years all that has changed. And nowdays, so many American females have grown out of husbandland they almost always show up at “Lunds” Super Market with a child or two with the little ones usually under age nine grabbing this and that to play or cause attention. And so what does one hear mama say nearly every visit?
“Jonnaleee, I’ve told you a hundred times not to touch things that don’t belong to you”….and indeed she most likely has asked a hunred times or more.
No one is listening to mama of “a hundred I told yous”. Nor do these creatures seem to listen while at school when such lessons as learning proper language usage is taught. Admittedly it probably isn’t as exciting and titillating as putting a condom on a banana as President Obama finds important for the first grade curriculum, but unlike condoms, learning ones language stays with a kid for the rest of his or her life if learned early and properly.
Properly would mean learning in a male environment as existed when I attended school. Nearly all of my teachers, almost all of the very good ones, were old–maids. Unlike today’s tubbies, butches, and sloppily dressed labor-union armies of the female sex, these old timers were in charge of the subjects they taught. And so, they had something to teach….They loved what they taught and they taught it well.
Thirty six kids in a classroom was standard……an no one dared to act out of place…..These perpetually age-50 year old maids didn’t carry lugers beside their skirts. There was no snake pit into which the ugly and profane could be dumped.
No one dared to be ugly and profane! It was all made very clear before anyone attended school!
The American male wss nearby…..the one who knew bull shit when he heard it and saw it, called it for what it was, and sent the brat home, to a misbehavior room, or out on his or her ear…….
Some of these ‘males’ were women. The adult was in charge and adult standards were established by male thinking and behavior. No one gave a damn about feelings. Students had to learn their lessons. That is what shcooling meant.
No one of authority in my entire school life from kindergarten through two graduate degrees ever asked me how I felt!
How I felt was my problem. I was told I should have been smart enough to stay home if I weren’t feeling well……End of story. Exam will be Thursday.
I taught for 13 years from the early 1960s to the early seventies, the beginning of the Age of Chaos in the American public school.
So they blame student ignorance on twitter and facebook, these days? What are the teachers teaching besides banana and women studies with beggings to get the students to Love Ms. Bechweldson or Bubba Jones.
Nearly all of language is constructed from rational patterns. Perhaps it was the guy in me, but braking down and building up language was always like solving a picture puzzle or algebra problem.
How can you instruct others to build up or take apart language if none of the teachers have a clue about it?
Today’s American teachers at nearly all levels who have direct contact with students are semiliterate at best in nearly every field they teach. How can they teach what they do not know?
If she…..and most of them are still she in the beginning school years and into middle school, doesn’t know the difference when to use LESS, rather than FEWER, how can she manage anything beyond what can be counted on her fingers?
We say “I have fewer dollars than JoAnne has to spend today.” The intelligent and well educated don’t say “I have less dollars than JoAnne to spend today.”……unless they are Lefties who like to invent their own languages and meanings.
Why don’t we say “I have less dollars”…..or “I have fewer money” Why is it we say “We need fewer typewriters than we used to”……rather than “we need less typewriters than we used to.”
The literate know that less and fewer are not interchangeable words despite how the illiterate use them.
Test your teacher, kids. Find out for yourself why they cannot teach much about the English language…..They weren’t taught it either.
(Thanks go to Mark Waldeland , for sending me the above article. Mark and I were teaching colleagues in a Minneapolis public high school more than 40 years ago…….when adutls were still in charge, but not for long.
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