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
While writing well might come natural to native speakers, it is not so straight forward for foreigners. If we take a look around us, most IT personnels are not native speakers (seriously, how many non-Chinese non-Indian do you see in a computer science class?). Our industry is running on foreign fuels (if one might say). Even people who have Ph.D. degrees in our industry cannot write well.
I agree that these people need to start writing well but unless there is a bigger population of good writers amongst us, there will not be a need for a change.
Posted by Dat Chu
on May 15, 2008 at 09:09 AM UTC - 5 hrs
Dat,
Even though I agree with your premise that "our industry is running on foreign fuels," I do not agree with your conclusion.
For one thing, I think writing well amongst people who do not write well automatically makes you stand out in a positive way, and that's the point of the post really.
However, if we change to thinking about the industry as a whole, I still disagree that there will not be a need for change.
I'm a native speaker, and sometimes I find it hard to understand non-native speakers (in speech, writing, or otherwise).
Most of the time, I can understand them, but every once in a while you'll come across someone who is particularly bad (I am not trying to make a value judgment, just an observation). If they are trying to speak or write English, and a native speaker has trouble trying to figure out what they are saying, how hard must it be for a non-native speaker? I would guess much harder.
When I notice it, I try to keep idioms and slang out of my writing for that very reason (or link to the meaning of it when I still use it). Of course, I'm not successful all the time in doing that, but when I notice it I try to. It's hard to notice because it comes naturally to me though.
Understand that I'm not talking about a few misspellings or abbreviations or wrong use of grammar or choosing the wrong word that sounds like the word you meant to use.
Even native speakers do these things and it's easy enough to understand what someone who does it is trying to say (be they native speaker or not). The goal is communication, after all, not tedium. =)
Instead, I'm talking about the atrocious overuse of those things: where misspelling is the norm and not the exception. Where they couldn't take the time to type full words instead of abbreviating every other one, or where they never run spell check or don't even care. This is not just native speakers of a language vs. non-native: both groups are equally capable and I've seen it in both.
Anyway, you do make a good point bringing that up, but I disagree about the lack of a need for change, as communication is important in our industry, and if everyone is speaking and writing in their own special versions of a language, I'm not sure how effective communication can be.
Posted by
Sammy Larbi
on May 15, 2008 at 10:14 AM UTC - 5 hrs
