Reader Dulani Jeetander writes:
I thought the earlier NY Times article missed the point regarding training in the liberal arts. This article shows the other side of all those well trained (and paid) engineers and computer scientists who despite their facility with equations have a hard time communicating.
An excerpt:
[A] study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.
The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said.
"It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard."
Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.
Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: "I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."
The incoherence of that message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training.
Reader Jonathan Hendry notes:
The quoted passage from the Times...doesn't support the idea that techies are to blame: " a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training."
Techies simply don't make up anywhere near a third of the employees in blue-chip companies. So non-technical majors would seem to be most of the problem.
And to the extent that techies do constitute the problem, consider that a company is *far* more likely to have foreigners with poor language skills in their technology department than in, say, marketing or legal.
The quoted example from the Times doesn't specify whether the analyst was a native English speaker, or a recent arrival from Asia or Eastern Europe or the Middle East, all of which are quite possible, and which is far more likely to contribute to communication problems than college major.
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