Grammar Gaffes In The Workplace
From the Wall Street Journal:
“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.” Read more here.
I think “the informality of email, texting and Twitter” is only part of the issue here. People who are well-educated and well-informed about how language works can shift flexibly among different modes, using slang and lower-case letters in an email to a friend and then adopting a more formal style of English in their professional communications. This is the capacity we need to foster in workers and before that, in students.