Article: Career Advice for You and Me

http://classroom.wsj.com/cre/2012/08/24/career-advice-for-you-and-me/

By SUE SHELLENBARGER

When Caren Berg told coworkers at a recent staff meeting, “There’s new people you should meet,” her boss, Don Silver, broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Florida marketing company.

When grammar gaffes invade the office, they embarrass the company

• VIDEO: Employers say the grammar skills of new hires are getting worse. But language is evolving so fast that old rules are eroding. The Journal’s Sue Shellenbarger has details
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“I cringe every time I hear” people misuse “is” for “are,” Mr. Silver says.
Mr. Silver, the company’s operations chief, also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with the word “like.” For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. “I am losing the battle,” he says.
‘RAMPANT ILLITERACY’
Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter, where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communication errors, many managers say.
There’s no easy fix. Some bosses and co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult business-grammar guides for help. In a survey conducted earlier this year, about 45% of 430 employers said they were increasing employee-training programs to improve employees’ grammar and other skills, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and AARP.
“I’m shocked at the rampant illiteracy” on Twitter, says Bryan A. Garner, author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage” and president of LawProse, a Dallas consulting firm. He has compiled a list of 30 examples of “uneducated English,” such as saying “I could care less,” instead of “I couldn’t care less,” or “He expected Helen and I to help him,” instead of “Helen and me.”

Looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communication errors, many managers say.

Leslie Ferrier says she was aghast at letters employees were sending to customers at a New Jersey beauty-products company when she joined the firm in 2009. The letters included grammar and style mistakes and were written “as if they were speaking to a friend,” says Ms. Ferrier, a human-resources executive. She had employees use templates to eliminate mistakes and started training programs in business writing.
Most participants in the Society for Human Resource Management-AARP survey blame younger workers for the lack of attention to fine grammar points. Tamara Erickson, an author and consultant on generational issues, says that people in their 20s and 30s who are accustomed to texting and social networking have “developed a new norm.”
ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT
But some grammar rules aren’t clear, leaving plenty of room for disagreement. Tom Kamenick battled fellow attorneys at a Milwaukee law firm over use of “the Oxford comma”—an additional comma placed before the “and” or “or” in a series of nouns.
Leaving it out can change the meaning of a sentence, Mr. Kamenick says: The sentence “The greatest influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey and Madonna,” means something different from “The greatest influences in my life are my sisters, Oprah Winfrey, and Madonna,” he says. The first sentence implies the writer has two celebrity sisters; the second says the sisters and the stars are different individuals. (The Wall Street Journal doesn’t use the Oxford comma.)
Patricia T. O’Conner, author of a humorous grammar guidebook, fields workplace disputes on a blog she cowrites, Grammar-phobia. “These disagreements can get pretty contentious,” she says. One employee complained that his boss ordered him to make a memo read “for John and I,” rather than the correct usage, “for John and me,” she recalls.
Mr. Garner, the usage expert, requires all job applicants at his nine-employee firm—including people who just want to pack boxes—to pass spelling and grammar tests before he will hire them. And he requires employees to have at least two other people copy-edit and make corrections to every important email and letter that goes out.
“Twenty-five years ago it was impossible to put your hands on something that hadn’t been professionally copy-edited,” Mr. Garner says. “Today, it is actually hard to put your hands on something that has been professionally copy-edited.”