Recent Business Studies
National and local surveys demonstrate the importance of writing skills for the workplace.
Current Challenges
The National Commission on Writing has determined that writing is a threshold skill in business today, and that executives expect concise, clear, correct writing from employees. In the Commission’s 2004 report, "A Ticket to Work or a Ticket Out: a survey of business leaders," concerns are raised that not only do entry-level employees lack writing skills, but recent college graduates have the weakest skills of all. Witness the following statements from survey respondents:
In 2007, nearly half of the HR executives surveyed by the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas concurred that recent graduates lack writing skills, and 27 percent of those surveyed said the graduates lack critical thinking skills as well. In “Young Workers: U Nd 2 Improve Ur Writing Skills,” the NY Times reported, “It seems that some young employees are now guilty of the technological equivalent of wearing flip-flops: they are writing company e-mail as if they were texting cell-phone messages with their thumbs.”
More recently, UpWrite Press conducted a joint e-mail survey with the Wisconsin Institute of CPAs. Read "E-mail survey points to expensive problems" to discover what 153 respondents across Wisconsin had to say about the cost of poorly written e-mails in their workplaces.