When people talk about keeping communication concise and to the point, they aren't insisting you write as if you were code-golfing. After all,
Vg'f abg sha gelvat gb haeniry fbzrguvat gung ybbxf yvxr frperg pbqr.
Using acronyms and abbreviations that come from the online subculture is acceptable in certain situations: IM with friends, twitter (where space is limited), and texting are three of them. An email to your boss, coworker, or a client is generally not.
Most people (but if my experience is worth anything, not even close to everyone) are fine in the area of not deliberately writing like that when communicating in some official capacity. So, in the "Me Rite Reel Nice" chapter of My Job Went To India, Chad Fowler focuses more on unintentional mistakes. He relates research that found
more than half of companies consider writing skills when making both hiring and promotion decisions. Forty percent of surveyed companies in the services sector said that a third or fewer of their new hires had the writing skills they desired.
Furthermore, Chad describes the necessity of knowing how to write well: As companies and teams move to a more distributed global model, much of your communication will be with the written word.
Unintentionally riting bad - fillng ur txt w/ speling and gramer mistakes can make you look sloppy, [im|a]mature, or even ignorant.
Sound like an easy way to stand out? See that red underline on the screen? That often indicates a spelling error. See if you can fix it. You wouldn't let that stand in your code would you? So why let it stand in your writing?
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We've received resume's with spelling mistakes in them - seriously, could the candidate not use the spell checker before sending? No excuse really, for this kind of stuff.
Cheers,
Davo
Posted by David
on May 09, 2008 at 08:32 AM UTC - 5 hrs
Don't forget about learning how to use proper punctuation as well. This is actually the most common mistake I see on a regular basis - in particular, people's obsession with needing to add an apostrophe before any "s" at the end of the word (such as Davo's "resume's" in the comment above). It's not too difficult a rule, yet way too many people can't seem to get it right: if you're adding the "s" to pluralize the word, it doesn't need an apostrophe ("resumes"). If it's there because of a contraction ("it's") or a possessive ("people's"), then you do.
Posted by
Rob Huddleston
on May 09, 2008 at 10:42 AM UTC - 5 hrs
