
Failure to communicate: Inability to write clearly is costly in the digital age - whitegloveapps
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/05/19/failure_to_communicate/
======
edw519
A lesson I once learned from a mentor: attention to detail in the little
things often demonstrates attention to detail in the big things.

No one really cares if you misspell a word, use the wrong tense, or make some
other grammatical error. But sometimes, that's all they've got to go on to
assess your attention to detail. I've seen vendors proposing multi-million
dollar purchases rejected because of carelessness in their writing. And the
explanation was always the same, "If he's that careless with his writing, how
careless will he be with my business?"

When the division manager who has made us $90 million misspells a word in an
email, no one bats an eyelash; he must have been in a hurry. But when a cover
letter has errors, it really makes people wonder.

~~~
anamax
> A lesson I once learned from a mentor: attention to detail in the little
> things often demonstrates attention to detail in the big things.

That's why Van Halen's concert contracts say "No brown MMs".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen#Contract_riders>

~~~
pchristensen
See also [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/386/F...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/386/Fine-Print)

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sqrt17
Is anyone else baffled by how the article title talks about "failure to
communicate" and then goes on to talk about basic things such as spelling and
grammar?

In my opinion, communicating something is a far deeper skill than just writing
correct grammar (and following your local style guide regarding other
conventions). It's about structuring your thoughts into a logical arguments
that others can follow, and that is specific enough that people can find out
on which points they disagree with you if they do.

Most from the Graham/Spolsky/whoever crowd can do this awesomely well, but in
all likelihood, not many enough people learn this in high school or college.
And it's something that overworked school teachers or TAs cannot ever hope to
address if they are to spend 15min. with a 10-page essay. (Why are they making
anyone write a 10-page essay if there's no time to provide adequate feedback?)

~~~
edash
That was my thought too.

At the risk of being snarky, I read this article as: Boring exposition, boring
transition, finally some data and then a hedged conclusion with no suggested
solution.

This article had impeccable grammar I'm sure, but I hardly cared because it
had a weak, watered-down message.

For a tech analogy, it's a bit like web service uptime.

    
    
      - No one will care unless something's wrong
      - It doesn't provide a net gain, it only prevents a net loss
      - It only matters if it's worth reading anyway

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jasonlotito
I've always avoided being the grammar Nazi, but it still bugs me to see lazy
writing, especially from people I know. Far too often, family members ignore
glaring rules of grammar without a care in the world. I fully realize I'm not
a paragon of English grammar myself, but I learn when corrected.

The problem is that for many people, it does't matter as much. If you have bad
grammar, or write poorly, it won't matter because so many other people have
bad grammar and write poorly as well. You don't see anything wrong with it.

It's usually simple things to: capitalization, punctuation, proper tense, and
spelling. I understand typos occur, and sometimes people just don't know
better. Fine. The biggest problems are the use of chat words, like "u" for
"you" and other problems. People use these in a casual atmosphere, and I feel
it becomes normal for them. They see proper writing as work.

Meh, I dunno, mybe i be tinkin 2 much abot tis.

~~~
yesimahuman
> It's usually simple things to:

Some people! :P

~~~
whitegloveapps
I was just waiting for the first grammar or usage mistake to be made and
pointed out in this thread. :-)

It's ironic that now, when anyone can publish their writing to the world in a
blog, so many people don't have the writing skills to communicate effectively.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Muphry's Law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law>

Also, it's always been true that many people don't have the writing skills to
communicate effectively. What's different today is that for the first time,
those people have the ability to publish their writing.

~~~
Retric
I don't think it stems from really increasing the author pool so much as
reducing the amount of effort put into editing the material. A good editor can
dramatically improve legibility, but few bloggers are paying for it.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
You raise an interesting point, but the purpose of an editor is to filter
content _before_ publication in a scarce medium so that resources aren't
wasted publishing crap no one wants to read. The editor serves the owner of
the means of publication and acts as a quality filter so that only content
worth buying and reading will make it into print.

Unlike a printing press or a broadcast frequency, the internet is unbounded
and access is dirt cheap. There's effectively no cost to publish crap, so
there's no reason not to wait until _after_ publication to filter for quality.

~~~
Retric
Editors do both. However, if you look at the standard quality of a small town
newspaper from the 1920's the overall quality is not all that high.
Realistically, papers like the New York Times are an outgrowth of having a
huge audience which can support a lot of staff, but there used to be a lot of
small players out there who had a lot less content to choose from.

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neovive
I wonder if, over time, this trend will lead to a shift in what is considered
acceptable writing. Once the "texting" teenagers of today take positions of
leadership in government and corporations, they may be more accepting of this
writing style.

~~~
peschkaj
Mark Twain complained about this long ago. As a previous commenter said: it's
not so much that people are not able to write now, it's that they can publish
their bad writing. We have metrics in schools to track how well our kids can
write. We can blog about how poorly our co-workers write. It's more visible
than it ever has been.

At the end of the day, every communication with your employer is an
opportunity. If you can't communicate well, you will be less likely to get
what you want out of those interactions. On the other hand, if you're able to
write well and communicate clearly, you're going to get what you want far more
often.

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Perceval
As someone who has been a TA for the past three years at a top-tier
university, I have had the same experience as the author. It's shocking how
many students are admitted that do not know how to write an essay. I find that
I spend _at least_ half an hour per 10-page essay and almost always end up
drowning them (even the good ones) in red ink.

Perhaps this is due to growing up with a mother who worked as an editor, but I
tend to think that I'm not being overly harsh when I have to repeat the same
comments over and over again: proofread for typos, needs a strong
introduction, put your thesis up front, number your pages, use consistent
formatting, punctuation inside quote marks, footnotes outside quote marks,
don't use big fonts / extra spacing to pad the paper's length, use a
(correctly formatted) bibliography, don't cite Wikipedia (or any
encyclopedia), give the reader a roadmap up front, etc.

~~~
tiffani
I missed this one, but what's wrong with citing an encyclopedia other than
Wikipedia? :: prepared to learn something new today ::

~~~
MartinCron
It has been a long time since college for me, but I vaguely remember this one.

Just like Wikipedia, encyclopedias are not generally original source research.
Citing more specific original or closer-to-original sources gives the
evaluator more tools in considering the relevance or validity of an argument.

~~~
Perceval
This is pretty close to the reasoning. You can broadly categorize sources into
three tiers: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary sources are the actual documents or individual recollections involved
in an event—a treaty, a memoir, a transcript, etc. These are the archival
documents that historians love. A programming-language-analogy might be
writing something in a close-to-the-metal language like Assembly or C.

Secondary sources are usually synthetic works that comment on primary sources
and other secondary sources, or strongly advance/test a certain hypothesis.
These would be the works produced by historians, political scientists,
sociologists, and so on analyzing the historical data and evaluating the
theories of other social scientists. Most books fall into this category. The
analogy would be higher level languages like Java and Ruby.

Tertiary works are produced for the general reader. Rather than providing new
scholarship or advancing a hypothesis, they generally try to summarize the
existing consensus in a concise manner. Because encyclopedia articles aim to
give the generalist reader an overview, they are usually a good starting point
for someone with no background in a particular area. But, the idea behind
writing analytical or research papers is to get the student beyond just a
general familiarity with a subject, and to get them to engage some part of the
debate. Citing encyclopedias, while in and of itself not wrong, it usually
evidence that the student hasn't really engaged the topic. Presumably, if
they've read 3-6 secondary sources, they would have all the citations they
needed and the encyclopedia would be extraneous. The programming analogy here
would be using very little code to paste together a bunch of libraries that
you don't understand.

Wikipedia has an additional epistemic problem that other encyclopedias usually
don't have. Other encyclopedia entries are usually written by experts in their
field. There is no such guarantee for Wikipedia articles: they could be
written by experts, they could be written by 14-year-old Singaporean
communists writing from their mother's basement (I speak from experience as an
admin who's had to deal with this scenario). While studies have shown
Wikipedia to be comparable in terms of quality to mainstream encyclopedias,
there's no way of telling at any given moment which revision you're viewing
and who it was last edited by and what their level of expertise is. For that
reason, Wikipedia is usually _especially_ discouraged by academia, which as an
institution places emphasis on linking the authority of a piece with the
person who wrote it.

------
tjmaxal
And yet with all their errors, the majority of his students still pass and
presumably go on to be leaders or at least high earners. So even though it's a
"crisis" no one will do anything meaningful to fix it.

------
Alex63
I agree with the importance of good writing, but I'm curious about the
headline. As I read it, the author gives two examples of how poor writing is
costly: in terms of time spent correcting papers, and a reference to an
estimate from the "National Commission on Writing" that "remedying
deficiencies" costs as much as "$3.1 billion annually". There is no
explanation of how this estimate was calculated, nor does the article explain
how big the US economy is, for purposes of comparison.

------
tiffani
Makes me think of "Hire the Better Writer" out of Getting Real.
<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch08_Wordsmiths.php>

Edit: I'm the local grammar Nazi and have always been a fan of
engineers/programmers that could write their asses off, e.g. Paul Graham, Joel
Spolsky, _why the lucky stiff, etc., etc. Gives us all something to aspire to
is all.

------
vrode
And this applies especially to code.

~~~
lmkg
At my college, the "gatekeeper" CS course was notorious, even among non-CS
majors. Your code could compile, pass all the unit tests, have optimal
algorithmic efficiency and highly optimized runtime... and you could still get
a C- because you used inconsistent capitalization for your variable names, or
had misspellings in your comments[1]. May the ghost of Dijkstra have mercy on
you if you did anything "clever" at the high level.

The goal, of course, is not that later on you will spend half your coding time
thinking about variable capitalization. The goal is that when you're writing
your code, you pick good variable names automatically because you've built up
the reflex, by having the idea pounded into your head with the wrath of an
angry god. Anecdotally, the class was largely successful in its goal of
setting up good habits before the bad ones settled in. After taking that
class, people wrote code that was significantly more readable and maintainable
than they had written before, and the habits tended to stick.

I suspect that at least part of the problems with effective communications is
that we develop our early communications largely ad-hoc, and tend to build up
a lot of bad habits in the process. Without concentrated effort to correct
this habits, they remain and reinforce themselves through repetition. And of
course, concentrated effort doesn't scale well.

[1] Granted, part of this was because the class was graded on a negative
curve. If everyone got 145/150, then 145 is the average, which means a C.

~~~
count
In high school, my senior AP Eng. Comp class was similar. We had to write 2-3
page paper, in class, every day. The papers were all literary analysis (ugh!),
but it definitely sharpened the 'writing muscle'.

I can write much faster, with more clarity, than most people I know today -
all because of that one year of English.

------
byrneseyeview
This author does not understand topic sentences:

 _First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school.
I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I
helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts,
where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson,
where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students._

Maybe in informal academic writing, there's a special kind of topic sentence
whose purpose is to introduce an opportunity for promiscuous name-dropping.
I.e. in an essay on insomnia, one might write: "I usually wake up late. It's
because I go to parties at Noam Chomsky's house, or on Richard Dawkins' yacht,
or..."

~~~
isleyaardvark
It is name-dropping to an extent, but it is somewhat relevant. A lot of people
would expect freshman students at prestigious schools to have a decent grasp
of the English language.

------
greenlblue
Communicating well is just as hard as any other worthwhile activity and it
doesn't come naturally to most people. It took me forever to figure out that
part of the reason that I was always so frustrated with people was because I
wasn't communicating well enough with them. Oftentimes I'd think I had
expressed one thing and later I would find out that the other person had
completely misinterpreted my meaning. After the n-th time I figured I was
partly to blame and decided to do something about it and picking up a grammar
book was the first step. It's not hard, it just takes practice like anything
else and the benefits of being understood better are definitely worth it.

