In the Times last week it was reported that “The written English of British undergraduates is significantly worse than that of overseas students. Apparently UK based students make 52.2 punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors per page on average, whereas international students make just 18.8.”
How frightening is that? People who do not know how to write their own language? And, through my work helping people to write clearly and concisely, I know it is true. I see so many examples of poor business writing when I go into organisations. Most are of these errors are caused by poor teaching at school. I feel so sorry for students who were taught English at a time when it was fashionable to encourage creative writing and not worry about sentence structure. They were often taught too by teachers who themselves had no real understanding of English Grammar or who were poor at spelling and seemingly not worried by it.
I was recently asked to run a business writing session for a group of Japanese business people who were concerned their written English was not as good as it could be. However it was soon obvious that there was nothing wrong with their English. The fault lay with their English managers who were not aware of correct grammar or punctuation. The overseas business people were being given faulty advice on when to use apostrophes, when to use singular or plural endings and how to identify the object and the subject in a sentence.
Grammar and punctuation are not difficult to learn as an adult. And when you can use English well you can be sure your message is being understood by your customers.
Quicklearn specialises in teaching Business Writing skills. Workshops include using Emails effectively, writing well structured Reports which people want to read and making sure Minutes from meetings are a true reflection of what was discussed.
