The e-mail era spawned a new age of ignorance

Sure, E.B. White drummed into our heads, “omit needless words.” He insisted that “vigorous writing is concise,” but he didn’t mean the e-mail practice of today: abbreviating, using slang or other jargon, and in general, writing unintelligible correspondence – all ending in exclamation marks, to boot.

White’s instruction to anyone who writes for a living or, for that matter, anyone who writes at all, is “not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” Furthermore, he meant for the words, sentences and paragraphs to tell with clarity, not with convoluting confusion.

Take this e-mail as an example of the crude shorthand sent, ironically, by a writing student to her high school teacher: “If u get this mesage about the assgnment I didn’t get cud u plez respond.”

Recently, I came across an article from The New York Times written by Sam Dillon almost a year ago and titled “What corporate American can’t build: A sentence.”

The report stated a survey of 120 American corporations, conducted by the National Commission on Writing, concluded that a third of employees in the nation’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly, and businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. Some $2.9 billion is being spent by corporations to help current employees with the rest of the sum spent on new hires.

So these high-priced professionals in high-tech industries need remedial training. What about the doctor who repeatedly uses the word “uncontributable” or the lawyer who doesn’t know the difference between “it’s” and “its”?

The New York Times article quoted a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the commission study, who said companies need people “who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard.”

Instead, they let their fingers do their talking – unfortunately with incoherent correspondence.

The Times article quoted R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing. “E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen. It has companies at their wits’ end.”

It also has English teachers tearing out their hair, proofreaders wearing out their pencils and writing coaches in demand. Public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers are offering – in evening workshops or online – remedial writing courses to adults already in the workplace and those who soon will enter.

Such instruction should prove helpful, but not always so.

“I cant thank you enough,” wrote one of my students about a writing course.

“Its helped me a lot.”