I had a conference call earlier this morning for a volunteer group. During the call, one of the participants remarked that the college students he encounters are unable to write a professional letter. Now, I will say that most of those that I come into contact with are very articulate and well polished young men and women, but I know what he was trying to say. It is is not something taught as part of a curriculum, and it certainly not enforced by the social expectation of using text messaging and short bursts of information through Twitter or the casual e-mail.
My handwriting is an example of what happens when a skill is not used often enough. You can ask any professor or co-worker how difficult it is to discern my "5" from an "S" or why a "P" looks more like an "l" and an "o". This demonstrates what can happen when technology, in my case typing 98 percent of my written communication, creates a deficiency for using the more traditional approach.
It is much more severe in professional writing. While I can turn to a computer (or, when something must be handwritten, my wife's polished script) to replace my handwriting, nothing can replace the ability to string together a few sentences to form a coherent, actionable thought. Blogging has taught us to take a more casual, conversational approach to communicating at the expense of maintaining a bit of credibility. If I want to be taken seriously, there is no way that I am handwriting a letter. Much the same, I would not use a "blog-like" approach to getting my message across. Even though we live in a world where executives at Fortune 500 companies can fit their thoughts in the 140 character limit of Twitter, they most likely did not arrive to that point in their lives without a basic understanding of how to write a professional letter.
The other side to writing is proofreading. I occasionally receive e-mails from vendors and customers that are clear in their intent, but short on making sure that there are not grammatical errors or misused words. Even when distracting, I can overlook the occasional error in subject-verb agreement or stylistic errors. I am far from perfect myself in that regard, and find it amazing that my day job even has a component of it where I am expected to correct such errors. The Internet generation has turned such errors into their own language ("LOL-speak"), so it may be a matter of time when a traditionalist like myself will find myself writing the words "I CAN HAZ PROMOSHUN?" to a boss.
(Shudder.)
I am interested in taking a corporate communication course or two as a means of self-improvement. Time constraints aside, I know that I could use some remedial instruction to undo the damage caused by reading "bad influences" on the Internet.