Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo out there? I'm kinda far behind with mine.

 RockRelic wrote: 
Personally, here's what I think. If you can read it, it has some depth with good story telling, it's enjoyable to read, and the entire text isn't bold, Ithen the English is just fine.

Hi everyone!..I'm brand new to Radio Paradise, so please excuse some possible errors!  Plus of course, I'm an Ex-Pat Englishman living in France, which covers a multitude of sins!
I've scanned through some of the comments and discussions and it seems to me that BAD English Grammar is a worldwide problem!  I'm not implying that all my recently acquired fellow members are illiterate, but there does seem to be some agreement out there that using the written word has become slovenly and lazy...yes?
Do we blame text messaging or the English teachers? For what it's worth, our son has just obtained his French degree as a Professor of English and is now teaching at a particulary 'difficult' college in Paris. His new, unadulterated view is that youngsters do not appreciate, or seem to need a correct language structure in their day to day lives.  OK,..it should be his job to teach them the basics, but it seems a lonely, uphill slog!
What are his chances, when daily, they are inundated with media language that bears little resemblance to the text book stuff!  Any comments or responses?

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 
now, now.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 

Bloody accountants.

 winter wrote: 
Exactly, and its a point a lot of companies overlook. In my field I sort of understand. It is dominated by accountants who spend 99% of their time using spreadsheets (we even used to get thirty page reports with each sentence spread out over two or three Excel cells (there's brilliance for you). So there is a lack of a writing culture. I have no problem with that AS LONG AS they realize they have a weakness here and seek support. It's the ones who refuse to acknowledge it out of sheer ignorance or bull-headedness that I want to decapitate.

Last month I got an appalling report from business consultants for a client of theirs who just happened to need 400 million from the bank so, yeah, it was, how do you say, important. The idiots, out of sheer arrogance, chose to wrote it in English which made a bad report even worse. It had stunningly creative usage in it like this:

Whereas the economy was growing. The company is planing for growth but sales in Asia are in the stable.

 And they wanted money for this? 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
True.

When I worked for the bank, the documents I saw there were all competently written. No one filled their reports with big words they didn't understand just to sound good. No one padded their arguments by repetition. No one misused grammar, and everyone used spell check.They placed a higher premium on doing it right than doing it now, which is one reason why they've been around so long and been so successful.

At DISH, it was a very different story. I had a colleague who wrote entire memos in bold red type, because he said he'd been taught in college that this gave emphasis. (I tried to point out that the emphasis came from contrast, but he didn't get that.) Another wrote as if he'd never graduated from junior high - misspellings, bad sentence structure, bad grammar, you name it. I tried to get him to take a business communications course to help him in his career, but he didn't see the point. Memos would come down from HQ with mistakes and bad writing, then get retracted an hour or two later - only to be replaced by something barely better. The bitter joke among employees is that DISH stands for "Do It SomeHow", and it's close to the mark. They have a pretty strong implicit contempt for anything resembling actual planning or project management. (The project plan for opening a new call center was one tab of an Excel spreadsheet. )

My current employer tends to be somewhere in the middle. The writing there is pretty good - not the same as the bank, but a damn sight better than the amateurs at DISH. They'd still rather wing it and fix any problems as they come up than actually think a plan through, but at least they're not openly hostile to looking before they leap.

Anyway, my point is that in my experience the level of writing skill in an organization tends to depend on the institutionalized professional standards.

 winter wrote: 
A lot of interesting parallels here. I too studied political science and now I earn my crust translating business reports (oh how the mighty failed to get on the right bus) but you are right. VERY FEW business reports are well written. They just don't know how to build up a logical argument and even when they do they fill their reports with endless non-sequiturs and gibberish. It could be quite a good market to get into if you can do it well. I don't recommend it though. I get quite murderous when I see some of these and just want to behead the author.

 winter wrote: 
Read that as "this work," not "his work," and thought "Teaching comp?  There's not a more thankless pursuit on earth."

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 



Thanks. I'm just trying to avoid turning his work into my work.

 winter wrote: 
See, that's what I was saying.  Only you know the relationship between you and the co-worker and how much effort you need to expend.  That's a lot of help, B, and I'm sure he will be grateful.   

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 



If I had turned in a paper like this to a poli-sci or English professor back in my college days, it would have come back bloody. Or at least I think it would have. Maybe my standards are high, me being me.

I'm seeing poor structure, badly expressed arguments, and a thesis that's more restated than defended. I think someone pursuing a business degree at one of the top schools in the country should have learned better writing skills. He's certainly going to need them.

I'm leaning toward cleaning it up and maybe giving him some general pointers to polish the writing. We'll see.

 Xeric wrote: 
Not a bad idea, either.   One way or another.  B saw other issues that would have probably been noticed by a professor in a college level writing course, and would have liked to help the co-worker present a more perfect paper, "without either giving him a whole remedial course in writing (which he isn't paying me for) or basically writing big chunks of it for him."  B was looking for a graceful way out that would still leave the co-worker grateful for his services.  I would bet he has already figured that out without our advice, ready as we are to give it.

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 


Oh, wait—my point was the perhaps a cleaning-up of the grammar and mechanical issues (a legit paid-service sort of thing, not in danger of plagiarism issues) and calling that good would do the job. . . .

 Xeric wrote: 
Well, yeah, maybe?   But Winter posted that yesterday, and that paper has to be turned in sometime. He was looking for a way to help, and just sitting on the problem is not going to help.  He needs something to tell his co-worker that will produce a paper that can be submitted and it's not Winter's obligation to produce that paper.  Just a way out of a potential problem for  B.  Whether B's appraisal of the paper is overly critical is immaterial.  The co-worker asked him for an opinion, maybe hoping for someone to do the cleanup for him.

 OlderThanDirt wrote: 


Uhmmm . . . disagreeing that the issue is likely to be that he's "not putting in the time." That's possible, I guess, but it's as likely a matter of inexperience, lack of natural talent, or both.

Here's the question: are there stylistic issues such that his teacher, his classmates, his potential peers in the field in question are going to see them? Or are they things that you—nuanced and elegant writer that you are—chafe at, but that the work's likely audience is never going to question?

 winter wrote: 
Agreeing with starcloud.  Tell him what you told us, give him an example, let him clean it up. 

 winter wrote: 
A good professor (mentor) would send them back to the drawing board! If it's that bad, sounds like he' s not putting in the time . . . just saying! 

A friend from work asked me to edit a paper for one of his college assignments, and I have to tell you it's harder than I anticipated.

Finding the grammatical and technical errors is easy enough. But there are just so many stylistic issues it's hard for me to resist pointing them out. It's not that I don't want to help him, but I don't know a good way to point out the issues without either giving him a whole remedial course in writing (which he isn't paying me for) or basically writing big chunks of it for him (which I flatly won't do).

It's one thing to make suggestions to a fellow writer who has the skills and self-confidence to reject them if necessary. It's another to make suggestions to a novice who might very easily adopt them wholesale and wind up committing plagiarism. I'm trying to steer far clear of any potential plagiarism issues - the phrasing needs to be 100% his, but his phrasing is far from ideal.

Any suggestions, sisters/brothers of the pen?

American Greetings is looking for a writer - but I would have to move to Cleveland!!! ARGH!
I wonder if they'd let me work from home.