nytimes.com
Defending English From Assault on the Job
By JOHN HENDREN
PITY the linguistic purists. An Apple Computer advertisement exhorts, "Think different" when it means "differently." A health insurer writes to a policy holder, without humor, to say, "Thank you for your patients." The trouble even reaches inside the Oval Office to President Bush, who has said, "Reading is the basics for all learning" and has vowed not to let terrorists "hold this nation hostile."
A new breed of corporate linguists warns that an assault on the English language is intensifying in the American workplace, from executive suites to cubicle seats. The culprits, says Lynn Agress, a former English professor at Johns Hopkins University, are television, the informality of the Internet and schools that sometimes emphasize computing over reading.
For Ms. Agress and other guardians of grammar, there is a consolation: the age of technology has brought them full employment. She and other writing consultants are teaching lawyers, doctors and corporate executives what they may not have learned in school.
"As technology improves and expands, literacy declines," said Ms. Agress, founder of BWB — Business Writing at Its Best. "With e-mail, writing just keeps deteriorating."
BWB, founded in 1981 and based in Baltimore, charges $5,500, plus travel expenses, for two half-day sessions for 10 employees. A series of 13 sessions costs $66,000. Participants are asked to submit writing samples to Ms. Agress or another instructor, who then pinpoints trouble spots and tailors a training course using the organization's writings. In one session, a manager at CareFirst BlueCross and BlueShield was asked to write to a cancer patient to say he had exhausted his prescription drug benefits.
Other BWB clients have included AT&T, Citibank, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Johns Hopkins Medical Center and the staff of Gov. Parris N. Glendening of Maryland.
Ms. Agress has also been enlisted to help the Baltimore Police Department's high-ranking officers. Edward T. Norris, the commissioner, says he sometimes has trouble understanding police reports, like one about a kidnapping that he read while working in New York City: "Subject did abducted woman without no illegal right."
"I don't know what that means," Mr. Norris said. "It seems like there's been a real falloff in basic writing skills in employees in general. The writing is really poor on a lot of levels. And, frankly, it can be embarrassing for the agency."
The most common problem cited by writing coaches is wordiness. Government writers, in particular, can produce triumphs of obfuscation. Richard Lauchman, a business writing consultant in Washington who specializes in government agencies, offers this writing sample from a manager for the Federal Trade Commission: "Purification of unliquidated obligations is essential for the early identification and correction of invalid obligation amounts to ensure full and effective fund utilization."
The writer was trying to convey a timely warning — that unless the department spent the rest of its budget by year-end, the money would be lost, and that amount would be cut from next year's budget.
"This is a perfect example of a writer simply being afraid to say what he means," said Mr. Lauchman, whose fees start at $2,000 a day.
The Pentagon leaders who gave us "kinetic kill vehicle" where others might have been content with "missile" are clear innovators. A recent memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency offered this observation: "The undersigned has devised a narrative that delineates chronological aspects of a given environment, twice pronounced in differing configurations, of which one is decidedly superior to its counterpart."
Mr. Lauchman, who ran across the excerpt in a workshop, could not remember what the writer meant to say. "Anyone smart enough to have written that sentence could have written a simpler one," he said.
When technical jargon and basic language problems combine, the results can be messy. Engineers at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, many of whom learned English as a second language, write to lawyers, most of whom are greater masters of law than science.
One employee meant to say this: "You can't have a patent because your invention is too obvious. Anyone who knew what he was doing could have combined the products of three other inventors: Tang, Pang and Oba."
But the employee wrote this, "It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made to have included an input buffer in the apparatus of Tang in view of Oba as taught by Pang for the purpose of providing an input signal from the pad to the internal circuitry of Tang in view of Oba."
Corporate spin doctors can also use some polish. Public relations agencies and investment relations officers, the public faces of Fortune 500 companies, are among those seeking help from George Harmon, a corporate writing coach and professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
"What I've seen is general deterioration to the point that companies hide positive information in a blizzard of verbiage," Professor Harmon said. "I had a guy recently who couldn't pick the noun out of a sentence. It's as if carpenters didn't know the name of a nail or a hammer anymore."
Plain sentences can be confusing, too. A Food and Drug Administration official wrote this in a report about the active ingredient in NutraSweet: "Aspartame (NutraSweet) is a potential hazard." A casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that the sentence meant that the additive could harm them. That was not the intent.
"What the F.D.A. writer told me it meant was that, `Currently we are unsure whether aspartame is hazardous.' " said Mr. Lauchman, author of "Plain Style" (Amacom). "To him, it was inappropriate for a scientist to be unsure. This is a shining example of attitude warping an expression."
Then there is jargon. Some businesses and industries invent words. Others create verbs from nouns. They "dialogue," "incentivize" and "impact," rather than talk, encourage and affect. They do not get the facts; they "ascertain the data." Corporate public relations departments have abetted the trend, writing coaches say, replacing elevator with "vertical access chamber" and losses with "negative growth." Cautious banks call bank robberies "unauthorized withdrawals." Some companies face no legal limits, just "obligational limitations." Grocery clerks are now "career associate scanning professionals."
Before writers modify the language, Ms. Agress said, they should master it. A glance through her files reveals lawyers who do not know "who" from "whom," insurance managers who confuse the possessive "its" with the contraction "it's" and architects who appear to insert commas at random.
It is a style that many learned in school, Ms. Agress said, and perfected in e-mail.
"People say, `Get computers in the schools.' We have children who can't read and write and speak," she said. "If you've got an English teacher who uses poor grammar, how can you blame students when they end up in my workshop 20 years later?" |
