Workplace Literacy? Is it in Danger?

By Mary Field

Current and emerging methods of electronic communication have consumers mesmerized. Electronic messaging in one form or another has come to rule our lives. Every sidewalk, bus, airport and shopping mall is filled with people looking down at hand-held devices searching for incoming text messages or popping away with their thumbs and preparing to send a text message.

As retail merchants we’d be foolish not to try to understand and make use of all these electronic formats to help grow our businesses. They are methods of 21st century shorthand communication. It is important to keep in mind however that in many cases the electronic text becomes the first and lasting impression your new audience will have of you. Consequently, you need to be mindful of the tendency to slip into hasty illiteracies and electronic jargon when communicating for business purposes.

It’s okay to use those cute little e-mail symbols when you’re sending a quick message to friends or family :) You’ve already built a relationship with those people and you are assured of future opportunities to clarify anything you’ve shipped off in a hurry into electronic hyperspace. But when you get too used to e-talk you can forget how important it is to write coherent sentences and to use proper sentence and paragraph structure.

Consider that the object of business communication is to send a clear message and to present a positive image of you and your business. You get only one chance to accomplish your goal. You want to be understood.

Widows and Orphans

Even if you prepare a perfectly literate message, the clarity and ease of understanding is dependent on the way the message is displayed at the receiving computer. Widows and orphans are those words or phrases that hang out all alone at the end or beginning of a line of text. Sometimes they even have a line of their own. In this part of the world we read from left to right and top to bottom. If lines of text are presented in an atypical fashion the reader may experience frustration and not finish reading. The following is an example.

>>Celine Dion
 is a Canadian singer and songwriter. Born to a large, impoverished
>> family in
Charlemagne,
>> Quebec.
If the reader has an interest in Celine Dion he will read the message. A reader with no interest will see confusing text and simply delete the message.

No Sense Nonsense

Another common electronic illiteracy occurs when words are misspelled or left out of a sentence making it difficult for the reader to understand the substance of the message. Sometimes it’s like trying to decipher code.

This is an e-mail message that was sent by a university student to her professor.

 “i am sending u the assignmnet again, i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respond . thanking u for ur cooperation.”

How many errors do you count? I count 15.

Sure, you can figure out what the writer is saying but if you were the professor reading this e-mail, wouldn’t you attach a red flag in your mind to the writer’s academic profile? I often receive illiterate e-mails from people who are asking me for information or advice. I’m always happy to try to help someone but frustration sets in when I have to read the request several times and perhaps ask a colleague to help decipher the text.

Here’s another example from a business e-mail thread.

"I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."

I see 10 errors here. The irony of this message is the writer’s topic is discrepancies in someone else’s e-mail.

Attachments

If you are sending a business communication via e-mail it is best to compose using a letter format in Microsoft Word and then attach it to your e-mail. Just the act of switching to the more formal Word program will likely cause you to lay aside e-mail jargon and develop a more business-like document of which you can be proud.

Here’s a word of warning. Don’t use fancy fonts that may not be available on the receiving computer. The receiving computer will either translate the font into something that it recognizes or it will replace a text letter with a symbol that looks somewhat like the letter. You’ll never know that this has happened but it will make your carefully designed attachment look amateurish.

Don’t depend on the grammar and spelling correction features of your word processor. You may mistakenly spell ‘from’ as ‘form’; ‘form’ is spelled correctly so the system doesn’t pick it up as an error. So review what you have written, keeping an eye out for errors. And remember that your spell check may not  know technical jargon.

Special Software

When you send an attachment, if you’ve used a software program that is not something many computer users would ordinarily have on their computers, they won’t be able to open it. Nothing is more frustrating to the reader when you have to download a program in order to open a document. The PDF format is pretty universal and is a free download but even there, if you have the current generation of PDF writer, make certain to create your PDF file so that it can be read by earlier versions of the program.

DNT ASM UR REDR = ATKSPKR (Don’t assume your reader is a tech-speaker.)

There is a time and place for quick shorthand communication but it isn’t in the workplace.