Okay, now it’s time for a little rant. One thing that drives me crazy is poor writing skills. Or worse yet, poor verbal skills on native English speakers. Now, I am not a professional writer. I don’t profess to be even a semi-decent writer! But I can string words together to write a sentence that is grammatically and logically correct.
Have you ever read an essay written by a fourth year college student? I have read several during my 8 years in college! I have, for the most part, been unimpressed by the level of writing skill I have seen. You might think that you would see this less in the corporate working world. Well, have no fear, poor writing skills are still here! I was assisting a friend of mine (name omitted to protect the guilty) in getting their yearly accomplishments together, when I realized how bad this could be. This person is smart, fairly well-spoken, very aggressive and generally liked by their coworkers. I was somewhat shocked to read their work. Last time I checked, a sentence should have a subject, at least one verb and an object, right? We are still adding “s” to make the majority of plurals, yes? You know that there is a difference between “there” and “their” or “to” and “too”, right?
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not being an elitist prick. Sometimes poor writing can result from simple abuse of the language. Computers are certainly changing the way we write and how we edit ([url=http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/future_of_english.txt]see this interesting article by Steven Pinker[/url]). Grammar and spelling checkers have left me with the inability to remember if “i” comes before “e” in words like receive. So, I have come to rely on these tools. They are built into almost every piece of text editing software that exists – use them!
Please, if you are reading this, look over a sample of something you have written in the past week and honestly critique what you read. If what you wrote could appear in print in your local newspaper, you’re probably okay. If it reads like the product of a psychotic mind, please go back and review your basic grammar (I suggest going to [url]http://www.edunet.com/
english/grammar/toc.cfm[/url]). You should probably learn how to use the thesaurus and spell checker functions of your word processor as well. You can also take a little more time while you are writing – go back and proof read what you wrote (one of the greatest lessons I learned was in my first college writing course – you will never write well if you do not revise, revise and revise!). Does it make sense? If your writing sample is completely incomprehensible, you might want to enlist the help of a professional. Most junior colleges and universities offer beginning writing courses that are enjoyable as well as helpful.
As we become more entrenched in technology, we will increasingly rely on the written word. Email, chat, electronic documents and web sites are pretty much today’s accepted methods of communication. It’s becoming increasingly important to be able to clearly and concisely communicate your thoughts in these formats. Don’t be a bad writer.