The article “Are Writing Deficiencies Creating a Lost Generation of Business Writers?” by Zane Quible and Frances Griffin talks about deficiencies of writing skills among business writers in U.S. companies. The authors explore the reasons for American employees’ poor writing skills and discuss the benefits of the glossing, the modified context-based approach and consistent error marking in reducing writing deficiencies.
Although the problem is not new and students’ writing skills have neither improved nor deteriorated over the past 15-20 years according to the National Commission on Writing (NCW), the issue attracted attention of policy makers and researchers after the NCW had published results of their study that concluded that American corporations spend as much as $3.1 billion annually to cover the tangible and intangible costs of the poor writing skills of their personnel. Grammar instruction is one of the key elements for analysing writing deficiencies. While some school teachers argue about the benefits and drawbacks of rules-based and context-based approaches for teaching grammar, the others tend to disregard grammar when defining good writing. This divergence of opinions on the role of grammar leads to the dissatisfaction of college professors and employers, who consider grammar an essential skill for their prospective students and employees. The current situation is such that according to Quible and Griffin governmental intervention may be required to align expectation in terms of writing skills among American high schools, colleges and companies.
In order to address the issue of writing deficiencies Quible and Griffin advocate the need to reduce the number of sentence-level errors that students make and recommend introducing new approaches, such as modified sentence-combining techniques, error labelling and glossing, in order to make students more aware of the grammar and punctuation mistakes they make. Furthermore, the authors believe that unless changes are made in the way grammar is currently taught, businesses will continue to bear the cost of poor writing skills of the business writers.
References
Quible, Z. K., & Griffin, F. (2007). Are writing deficiencies creating a lost generation of bueiness writers?. Journal of Education for Business, 32-36.
