Most people can't write for shit.
I never realized this until I started my first "real" job, as a technical support representative for a big software company, when I was 25. As a philosophy major, I was accustomed to writing long, excruciatingly detailed essays on vital topics such as "Do I Exist, And If Not, Can I Get An Extension on This Paper?", and was therefore woefully unprepared for the world of bullet points, smiley faces and the indiscriminate use, of "punctuation" mark's.
I was appalled to regularly receive emails like this one from coworkers:*
I am plannign on being in SF from the 7th Sep to the 18th the first week I will be at a meeting but the second week, am hoping to spend a lot of time with you guys and just wanted to make sure you are all available from 7th -18th
I thought to myself, "Wow, doesn't this person realize how retarded he sounds?"
The answer, sadly, is no. No one has ever told this person how retarded he sounds, because his coworkers are used to this sort of "communication," and many of them write just as badly as he does.
As a 25-year-old know-it-all, I took it upon myself to raise the bar. I went out of my way to correct the grammar, spelling and usage of both my peers and my superiors. One time my boss told me to "keep her appraised," to which I responded, "You know I think you're priceless."
My own emails were impeccably written and relentlessly analytical, not to mention long-winded and universally unread. What I eventually learned is that an academic environment gives you a false sense of the supply/demand ratio for carefully written, well reasoned, comprehensive arguments. In college, people keep demanding these papers from you, as if there were some massive shortage of undergraduate explanations for the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, though, most people don't give a rat's ass what happened to the Ottoman Empire, and if they did, the last person they would ask about it is
you. The people around you are only acting as if they care what you think because you are paying them thousands of dollars to pretend that they do.
Then you get into the business world, and you start thinking, "Man, this placed is so screwed up. I can't believe the idiots who are running this place. Well, I'll fix them. This is what I was trained to do. I'm going to write a manifesto!"
So you stay at work late for three weeks writing up this document that's going to change everything, and then you present it to your boss, at which point one of two things happens: If you have a good boss, he or she says things like, "This is great! I wish everybody would do stuff like this! We need to have a meeting to talk about some of this stuff!" And then six months later, nothing has happened.
If you have a bad boss, he or she says things like, "This is great! I wish everybody would do stuff like this! We need to have a meeting to talk about some of this stuff!" And then you get fired,
a la Jerry Maguire. I've had both kinds of bosses.
Eventually you realize that nobody in the business world reads anything longer than five lines, so if you need to make a point, you have to do it right up front. If you have so much information that you can't possibly cram it into five lines, then you have to put the important stuff in
bold, and put the really important stuff in
red. Sometimes you have
CAPITALIZE it too, if it's
REALLY IMPORTANT. It's a lot like dealing with seven-year-olds.
Human Inertia, my third worst boss ever, was particularly bad. He couldn't digest more than three bullet points at a time. I once wrote up a 2 page document outlining changes I wanted to make to our development process, and he scheduled a special meeting so that I could explain the "gist of it" to him. Yes, let's have a special meeting so that you don't have to spend ten minutes reading the thing I sent you. That's a good use of our time. I used to joke that I was going to draw a cartoon with Human Inertia receiving the Ten Commandments from God at Mount Sinai. He was going to be saying to God, "This looks great, but can you boil it down to three bullet points?"
Once I caught on to the short attention span affliction of the business world, I started using it to my advantage. I would send out long, dull emails with some vitally important policy change buried in the fourth paragraph. By the time anyone realized whatever it was I was up to, it was too late to stop me, and I would just hold up my hands and say, "I sent you an email...."
I've mellowed quite a bit in regards to the use of language since my 20s. I still grit my teeth when my boss sends me emails about "error's" he's getting in an application, but I don't say anything. I do, however, put my foot down when it comes to communications that are going outside of the company. I figure it's my responsibility to point out cases where the company that I work for is acting unprofessionally. I know that I'm not exactly a representative customer, but I can't be the only person out there who refuses to do business with an outfit that puts an apostrophe in the possessive form of
its.
(I'm dead serious about this, by the way. For example, there's a housing development near my house called "The Veranda's." With an apostrophe. Every time I drive past, I holler, "The Veranda's
what?" I wouldn't buy a house there even if my only alternative was to sleep in a refrigerator box under the freeway overpass.)
Working under the assumption that I'm not the only person who cares about these things, I refuse to go along with any improper punctuation that might make its way to a current or prospective customer. At Galactic Invertebrates, I was once asked to add a "Member's Area" link to the website. I refused, on the grounds that the area did not belong to a single member. I said that it should be
Members' Area. The marketing person who was trying to get the change made sent me a link to a rule that she claimed supported her usage. I emailed back, explaining how she had misinterpreted the rule, and gave her several examples of the correct usage. For example, I said, one goes to the
men's room (plural possessive, with the apostrophe before the s because the plural of man doesn't end with an s) or to the
ladies' room (plural possessive, with the apostrophe after the s).
Members' area follows the pattern of
ladies' room.
This sort of thing puts me in an awkward situation, because programmers are notoriously bad writers, and marketing folks are supposed to know how to write. Yet here I was, a programmer telling the marketing chick that she didn't know how to punctuate, period. I ended up enlisting the support of another marketing chick, but fortunately the conflict didn't escalate further. We compromised on
Members Area. I rationalized that this was okay because the area didn't necessarily belong to the members; it was just an area for members. Really it should have been
Member Area though. Like
employee lounge or
lifeguard station.
The thing that most drove me crazy at GI was the way people used the word
consortium. Or, more precisely
didn't use it. The company's whole business was managing technology consortia. A technology consortium is a group of technology companies. The plural of
consortium is
consortia. One consortium, two consortia. Simple, right? I mean, it's not exactly standard English, but if a person spent 40 hours a week every week managing consortia, you might think that person would take 30 seconds to learn the proper use of the singular and plural forms of that word. You'd be wrong.
Virtually everyone at that company acted as if
consortia were singular, making the plural form
consortias. We had customer service people talking to clients about how "this consortia is set up differently from our other consortias." It nearly gave me seizures.
And let me clarify that I'm not one of those language Nazis who insists, for example, that the plural of
podium is
podia, or that the plural of
scrotum is
scrota (as in, "You can totally see those guys scratching their scrota behind the podia.") I'm fine with
podiums and
scrotums. But please don't start with the plural and then add an
s to it to make it
more plural. Orators don't stand behind
podias scratching their
scrotas, no matter how hot and itchy they are.
I used to correct the speaker every time someone
consortia incorrectly. It got to the point where people would be afraid to say the word in front of me. They'd say, "We've been having some issues with this consor..." and then they'd trail off and look at me. And I'd say "Consortium.
Consortium is singular.
Consortia is plural. One consortium, two consortia." And then two days later we'd go through the routine again. The problem was that the incorrect usage had become so entrenched that it sounded weird when someone used the word correctly. So when I wasn't around, everybody would shift back to the more "natural" usage.
I guess that's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid that some day even copy editors and English teachers will drive past "The Veranda's" and not bat an eye. And I'll be out there, a crazy old man with a Sharpie, scribbling furiously at the sign and muttering about a time when people knew the apostrophe's place in the world.
*This is copied and pasted from an actual email I received. I just changed the details. And yes, I realize that "to regularly receive" is a split infinitive. Bite me.
Labels: Language, Work