Writing Skills: The ‘forgotten fundamental’?

• Fewer 12th-grade students can convey well-organized ideas

• Most students can’t provide coherent answers with clear language, supporting details, accurate punctuation, and creative thinking– “By the time students graduate high school, they should

be able to produce more than disorganized self-expression or Internet chat.”

– Communicating information and composing arguments are essential skills in business

– Is writing the ‘forgotten fundamental’?• Content, organization, sentence structure, grammar,

spelling, and punctuation– Just 14% of 12th grade boys “proficient,” cf. 33% of girls

• Do you read for pleasure? (Reading scores also down)• SAT will add essay portion in 2005

» Source: Evansville Courier & Press, 7/10/03; Washington Post, 7/10/03

Writing Skills: The ‘forgotten fundamental’?

• New data reinforces importance of teaching employees how to effectively communicate – Ability to write well "is now a core competence

requirement for advancement," and "workers who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired and are unlikely to last long enough to be considered for promotion"

– Although two-thirds of workers are expected to write business e-mails, proposals and other correspondence, only one-third are able to do so in "clear, logical prose," according to the National Commission on Writing, which surveyed 120 American corporations and 50 state government institutions

» Source: Workforce Week, 10/23-29/05

Building Writing and Grammar Skills

• Quotation Marks and Other Punctuation– Always place comma or period inside closing quotation marks– Always place semi-colon or colon outside closing quotation

marks– When question mark or exclamation point is part of quotation,

place it inside closing quotation marks– When question mark or exclamation point is part of entire

sentence, place it outside closing quotation marks• Subject and Verb Agreement

– Verb must agree with subject in person (speaker, person spoken to, person spoken about) and number (singular or plural)

• Ambiguous Pronouns– To whom does pronoun refer? (What is antecedent?)

• “I” rather than “We”