on Jan 19th, 2008Why Can’t People Write? (a linkedin answer)
I was over at LinkedIn answering a question and when I was done, I figured it was relevant to post it here as well:
The question from Michael Seidle was:
Why can’t people write?
Every time we go to find new employees, we run into an interesting phenomena: a lot of candidates look GREAT until we email them after the interview and get a response back and discover the quality of their writing is, shall we say, defective. Even worse, we’ve had people slip thought the cracks and get hired. Given the importance of email, documentation and communication, are solid writing skills necessary for white collar workers and customer facing employees? How do you ensure candidates have decent writing skills short of giving an essay test? Should we just give the essay test?
And my answer:
I can’t answer the “why can’t they write” question. If it was a matter of cursive or handwriting - well, who cares anymore? That is my opinion anyway.
I know people (my son) who can’t write legibly to save his life - quite literally.
He just never mastered the fine motor skills early on and the schools kept passing him through until he got to middle school and high school and the teachers started complaining about his writing.
But he can type about 60+ WPM and put together coherent sentences and paragraphs better than most college educated students.
I’ve ALWAYS done a lot of interviewing via e-mail - so I get an idea of how well they write, how quickly they respond to e-mails, how polite they are, etc.
I also always ask for a few writing samples:
- a piece of long correspondence either complaining to a vendor/customer or handling a customer complaint.
- a document outlining a policy or procedure
- something else they are proud of
That last one is key. You want people to have a certain pride about their writing. That way, no matter how good they are - they’ll always be looking to improve.
For me, it isn’t just grammar and spelling and putting sentences or paragraphs together.
Its more about readability:
Is their writing concise?
Do they use short sentences and paragraphs? Do they use a lot of white space to cut down on reader fatigue (especially important online)?
Do they get their point across at exactly the right time (not too early, not too late)?
Does their writing have a rhythm?
When applicable, can they tell a good story to get their point across?
Are we asking too much? Probably. For the last few decades our institutions of higher learning have been churning out engineers, accountants, MBAs, and computer scientists by the millions.
Over the next decade or so those skills will become commodities - if they aren’t already.
That’s why a liberal arts education where writing is the bulk of the work is going to be so important for college graduates over the next few decades.
The new economy needs people who can synthesize information, who can create memorable experiences, and who can tell a compelling story.
The best advice I can give to college and high school students isn’t even mine:
“The MFA is the new MBA” - Daniel Pink
I am very thankful that people cannot write. The root cause is that they choose not to think clearly. Until you can think it, you can’t say it or write it. What’s worse is that often these people will let others (such as me) put words in their mouth and just parrot those.
My business is a simple one. I provide writing services to senior executives. I provide them a clear competitive advantage. Once an executive realizes that others cannot write, s/he becomes a long term client.
I like the blog.
I tend to think that I can write. My huge problem is that I cannot write about myself. Each time I have to write a bio or answer the question in the interview - I feel I can’t bring myself into writing anything.
Ann, I think I’ve read a fair amount of things you’ve written. I don’t think you give yourself enough credit. You’re a very talented writer.
Writing is a skill that needs to be taught. Very few people do it well without any instruction. Kids should be instructed in a variety of different types of writing from a very young age, but unfortunately that doesn’t happen as much as it should.
One of the best ways to become a better writer is to read great writing. Again, most people don’t take the time to do this, preferring something from Cracked.com to Thomas Hardy or John Steinbeck (my two absolute favorites).
At my high school there were two English tracks - regular and accelerated. I was in the accelerated track, which culminated in AP English senior year. I remember one time in home room, when I was a freshman, the girl I was sitting next to was feverishly working on finishing her essay for her (regular) English class.
She asked me to take a look, and as I read it I was astonished. It wasn’t like it was just a slightly less coherent essay than one I might write in my accelerated English class. It was something completely other - like apples and oranges or chalk and cheese.
It lacked a clear introduction, there was no thesis, no coherent flow of ideas, and on and on. Apparently, as I began to ask her questions, they weren’t being taught those principles in her class. It’s not like she had a thesis that was just poorly worded. She didn’t know what one was!
That moment has stayed with me until this very day. It was then I realized that if you start on one track, you will never, ever be able to cross over into something more sophisticated when the time calls for it. She and I were on divergent paths that would never intersect.
Even though I started off by saying that writing skills need to be taught, I can’t help but think about Abraham Lincoln and The Gettysburg Address, which I read to my son this past week and barely got through without crying. It’s literary perfection; not a word could be improved.
Abe rarely attended school - he simply read every book he could ever get his hands on. That and his natural abilities enabled him to write one of the most profound speeches in the history of written and spoken language.
For the rest of us, though, there’s always room for improvement
Lori,
You hit the nail right on the head, and I couldn’t have said it better: we write what we read!
I’ve said that to different people for a long long time.
I was not what one would call academically inclined in high school. I was that part of the class that made the upper 95% of the class possible. But even then I liked to write.
I was at a disadvantage though. In my high-school the biggest lesson you were taught in English through all four years was: don’t write run-on sentences. To be honest, to this day I’m not even sure what this means. I took it to mean that if you need more than one “and” to complete a sentence, you should probably start a new sentence.
When I got to college - I was in for a shock. They expected a lot more from their student’s writing and it took me a long while to conform. And it was during this time that I noticed my writing improved whenever my choice in reading material improved.
Eventually I learned how to write “academically” and all was good with the world.
Post-college, I learned about style. Or more to the point - that good writing can take many forms, and some of those forms break with what we were taught were grammatical conventions.
And now that writing for the web is so important, those conventions seem to be even less relevant.
One thing I know about me is that I tend to be a literary mimic. If I spend a weekend reading a bunch of George Will opinion pieces, my writing will be very much different than if I spent that time reading Cracked.com (which can be artfully written in its own right), or even Tom Clancy.
This mimicry of mine can be both a blessing and a curse.
I have a non-fiction book I’ve been writing/playing around with for the past few years. Right now it is mostly a bunch of post-its, handwritten outlines, some relevant newspaper clippings and a few typed chapters all bound by a paper clip.
The problem is I haven’t decided what kind of book it should be.
Looking at the chapters I’ve started I bounce around all over the place. Sometimes it is a third person objective historical look, and at other times it can be a first person narrative full of casual language and idioms (much like my blog postings). And at other times it comes across as a mighty academic tome full of dense language and hard to follow sentences complete with citations.
I think I need to just put everything else down, not read anything for a while, and then see what kind of writing comes out of me naturally.
And as for Lincoln, one book he read a lot was the Bible.
The Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural speech are probably two of the best pieces of American speech writing ever - and you can tell from their pacing and language that he was heavily influenced by biblical verses.
Thanks for stopping by!
Yep, I definitely see the Bible cropping up in Abe’s writing. I’m sure the King James Version was the one he read. Biblical allusions are so powerful - like all of the ones that Dr. King put into the “I Have a Dream” speech.
I’ve always been a decent writer, but I can tell I’ve improved in the past year and half of blogging. Writing on a really consistent basis makes a big difference. I guess it’s like any skill - the more you do it, the better you’ll get.
Vinny -
It was fun and at times disheartening to read all the answers on LinkedIn. Thanks for noticing the question and answering.