Despite constant complaints and widespread evidence of bad writing all around us, I’m not convinced that the writing skills of the average person have really deteriorated that much. It seems to me that the more important change over the last decade or two is that we now expect everyone to be a writer. Just think about the changes that have happened in the workplace in the last fifteen years or so. When I left school and took a job teaching computer applications email was a relatively new means of communicating in the workplace and it often required you to memorize lots of commands that included backslashes and colons if you wanted to do something as simple as send a message. Colons! That’s enough to make anyone freak out a little bit. The awkwardness of these email programs meant that email was mainly something for the young, the adventurous, the geeky.
Even though this first “real” job was working for a company that provided computer training, email was still new enough that the company didn’t just hand out email accounts to every employee. You had to ask for an email account, and your request had to be approved by both your manager and by company headquarters in Texas. Most of the people I taught how to use Outlook or Lotus Notes worked at big companies or government agencies but had never used email. Some of them had never used a computer.
When I went to work for a law firm a couple years later email was more widespread, but we still had partners at the firm who didn’t have email accounts. In this case it wasn’t because they lacked the approval to get an account but because they didn’t want to have to learn to use a computer and to regularly check to see if they had mail. Taking care of the mail was something they were used to having their secretaries (law firms are such conservative places that they still use the title “secretary” when every other workplace seems to have moved on to “administrative assistant” or just “admin”) do for them. Frankly, they saw the idea of working with a computer and answering mail as things that were beneath them. They were lawyers, for crying out loud! Now that clients demand twenty four hour access to their attorneys and it seems as though a Blackberry is a basic necessity for anyone doing business, it’s hard to imagine that they would resist having email accounts. But trust me kids, it’s the way things were.
It wasn’t that long ago that most writing responsibilities at large companies like my firm were handled by a few specialized employees who were largely professional writers. These people, attorneys writing contracts and briefs, marketing people creating news releases and advertising material, managers drafting memos and reports on whatever it is that managers report on, were supported by a large group of employees who were expected to do little writing, if any. Secretaries were called on to interpret and type up the words scrawled or dictated by their bosses, but were seldom required to draft anything on their own.
Of course it was much the same in other kinds of workplaces. Most people who worked for a living-- clerks, factory workers, truck drivers, janitors, construction workers, salespeople-- did little or no writing. But even in professional organizations such as a banks or accounting firms there were lots of people who had no need to write. The people who worked in the mail room delivered the mail, but didn’t create much of it themselves. These days it might seem insensitive, but it probably would have struck many people as odd to think that the mailroom staff would ever need to send their own messages to everyone in their company. But now we automatically give every employee an email account and access to the distribution lists that enable them to send messages to everyone at their firm with no more effort than a click or two, no matter how big the company might be. And we give them little, if any, training on how to use these powerful and potentially dangerous tools. Most email training that companies provide-- if training includes the topic of email at all-- is focused on which button you hit to start a new message or how to send a meeting invitation. Training programs are so pressed for time and resources that important subject like etiquette, the use of distribution lists and the mechanics of writing itself aren’t discussed at all.
As bad as the email situation is it actually amazes me that we don’t have more disasters than we do, especially considering that people often don’t even seem to be speaking the same language. Take the example of messages written in ALL CAPS. When I ask a classroom of people about their top annoyances in email, this is always near the top of the list. It’s usually the second thing mentioned, right after emails that are just TOO LONG. For most people, an email written in all caps signifies that the writer is angry and “shouting” at their recipient. Even though they’ve probably never been formally taught email etiquette, this meaning is something that most people have picked up along the way. But not everyone.
Almost every time this topic comes up in class there is someone in the room who is surprised that this would be read as rude or explains that they write to an elderly relative in ALL CAPS because they think it is easier to read that way. These aren’t bad, angry people; they actually think that they are being polite and helping their readers. (It’s true, by the way, that it actually takes significantly longer to read text written in ALL CAPS. A better solution for making text more legible for aging eyes would be to set the display properties on your computer to use large fonts. But how many older computer users know how to do that?) I was surprised myself the first time I became aware of this disconnect in the way people were trying to communicate, one person trying to help and make things easier to read while the other thinks they’re being yelled at.. But why should I have been? There are whole generations of people out there who are befuddled by the use of “LOL” and winking smiley faces scattered throughout emails-- and just as many young people rolling their eyes at the old-timers who don’t get it.
Most of the time no one teaches us this stuff-- it’s something people have to figure out on their own, through context. Throw in the fact that most of us never were very good writers (or readers) to begin with and it becomes even harder to figure out what message people are trying to get across in their email. Now when I encounter someone who writes all of their messages in caps-- “THANKS” in addition to “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO FOR LUNCH TODAY?” and “SEND ME THE REPORT BY 3PM”-- I don’t automatically assume that they’re an angry jerk (though that’s often exactly what they turn out to be). Instead, I try to gently suggest that other people might be reading their messages that way. Even better, especially if I suspect that I really am dealing with an angry jerk, I ask HR to have that talk with them.
When you think about it, someone made a point of teaching you all the forms of communication you use. Even though our brains are wired to learn them, none of us are born with communication skills. Your parents probably taught you to say “hello” when you answer the phone and “goodbye” when you hang up. Hopefully they encouraged you to say “please” when you were asking for something and “thank you” when you were lucky enough to get it. If you ever had the privilege to take a typing class, chances are you spent more time learning the correct format for business letters and memos than you spent learning how to press the right keys without looking at them. Back then the form of your message, the way that it looked, was critical to what you had to say. Writing a letter correctly showed that you were respectful and competent. When I took typing in the tenth grade Mrs. Davenport would smack my desk with a yardstick if she caught me looking at my fingers while I typed. But it was worse if you didn’t get the format of the letter correct-- she’d make you retype the whole thing until you did.
As far as I know, there are no equivalent classes for learning the correct format for email correspondence. Instead we assume that email is like all other forms of written communication. And it’s not. Even if high schools and colleges turned out graduates who were capable of writing perfect five paragraph essays-- and trust me as someone who tried to teach those kids, they don’t-- that doesn’t necessarily mean that these writers would be adept at writing email. Because with all the advantages inherent in email conversation (it’s fast, it’s easy), it also has some major drawbacks as a form of written communication. Some of the biggest are probably the very things that we like most about email.
It’s probably just too fast and too easy.
Think about those memos we old-timers learned to write in typing class. There was a lot of work that went into them. Chances are, most business memos probably started out as a draft scrawled onto a legal pad or dictated onto a tape that was then handed off to a secretary to be deciphered and transcribed. People took their time composing them because corrections meant starting over or performing messy surgery with correction fluid-- or even with scissors and tape. So there were a couple drafts, maybe several, involved in writing them. Once a document was finished, someone had to physically deliver it. If it was going to be delivered outside the firm, it would require postage. We even used to go to the extra expense of printing engraved letterhead and envelopes. Because of all this effort and cost, people didn’t just send out a bunch of stuff that didn’t need to be sent out and they didn’t create nearly as many half-baked documents that could get them in trouble. It was just too hard.
On the receiving end, people didn’t send out nearly as many cranky or angry responses to paper memos because there was a built-in delay between when you received a message and when you could get a reply into the hands of the sender. Mail was only delivered once, maybe twice, a day. Since there was going to be a significant lag time between when you first started composing a letter and when it would finally get delivered, you really had to think about whether your message was still going to be relevant when it got there. You could even count on that delay to consider how you wanted to respond. Since everyone knew that it took some time for written correspondence to make it’s way around, no one expected a response right away. People who worked together did most of their business in person or over the phone if they needed to get something done quickly.
How quaint. How nice!
