Business schools take aim at bad writing

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“They have to focus on the needs of the reader,” O’Rourke said. “Otherwise, she won’t pay attention, she won’t do what you want, she won’t retain what you said.”

IM contributes to bad writing
Plenty of experts share the belief that IM creates or at least contributes to bad writing.

Tom Clark, an Xavier University business professor who also teaches writing skills at Procter & Gamble Co., says short communication is becoming the norm as more people derive their habits from instant-response communications media. That may be good news for those who abhor reading long documents but it’s not so great for quality writing reflective of long-term thinking, he observes.

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“Young people are wrapped up in the speed with which they communicate rather than seeing writing as a reflection of their best selves,” he said.

Paula Hill-Strasser, an adjunct business professor at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, says even the brightest students seem to struggle more with writing than they used to. She suspects the lapses — such as constant use of “they” as a pronoun and writing paragraphs that run three-quarters of a page — are linked to young people’s increased multi-tasking and electronic distractions.

Addressing a shortfall
“For whatever reason, we are finding the business writing skill-set to be missing,” she said.

Trying to address the shortfall, SMU requires business students to write more company profiles and case studies than before.

But some experts say IM has gotten a bad rap in the office and defend it as a valuable business communications tool.

“The problem isn’t due to IM,” said Beth Hewett, a consultant on online and traditional writing programs. “Instead, I think that laziness and lack of understanding of formal business conventions are more responsible.”

Business students at Miami (Ohio) University’s Farmer School of Business work on rhetoric and are reminded to tailor their writing style to the purpose. They are told that conciseness and understanding one’s audience are more important than ever.

“People have been complaining about the quality of student writing since Plato,” said Kate Ronald, an English professor who runs the school’s Howe Writing Initiative. “But I think businesses are paying more attention to it. Businesses today are doing so much more writing, and doing it so much more publicly — because so much of the discourse is discussed on the screen rather than on paper.”

Some companies, Procter & Gamble notably among them, are working to correct bad writing habits with their own in-house writing courses.

But there still isn’t much of a market overall for business writing classes, according to Peter Handal, CEO of Dale Carnegie Training.

“I think that would suggest that people are just so happy to get the communications going that they aren’t spending the time on how to communicate,” he said.

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