August/September 2006

Volume 47, Number 1

President's Corner

by Deb Lockwood

The following quotation appeared in the July 31, 2006 issue of Time magazine in an article written by Barbara Ehrenreich:

“Among other things that have changed since the ‘60s is the corporate culture, which once valued literacy, numeracy, high GPAs and the ability to construct a simple sentence. No doubt there are still workplaces where such achievements are valued, but when I set out as an undercover journalist seeking a white-collar corporate job for my book Bait and Switch, I was shocked to find the emphasis entirely on such elusive qualities as ‘personality,’ ‘attitude’ and ‘liability.’”

Many people in corporations don’t have the ability to construct a simple sentence. What does this mean for our profession? If the people we work with and for think that personality and attitude are all that we need to be considered good employees, and that literacy and correct use of our language are no longer necessary, where does that leave us?

I have been pondering that quotation. At first I thought that in this article I would consider how we got into this situation. But as I sat down to write I realized that identifying the cause is not where we need to spend our time. I really don’t care how we got here—it’s time to focus on the solution to the laxness and inexactitude that have weakened our corporate communications skills.

In these days of “lowest common denominator” writing exacerbated by our online culture (I particularly loathe the abbreviations used in instant message conversations), an offsetting voice must call for accuracy and correctness.

What is more, for the sake of our readers, we are using a smaller vocabulary because our common lexicon has greatly diminished in recent decades. Yes, we must consider our audience: if they can’t understand what we are saying, the communication isn’t meeting their needs. And yes, we need to write with translation in mind. But let us not sacrifice the beauty of our language for the sake of simplicity. There must be a middle ground.

Let us challenge ourselves to use a bigger word once in a while when we communicate, a word more exact in its meaning. It’s no sin to send a reader to a dictionary occasionally. And now that there are dictionaries online, they don’t even have to crack the spine of a book to look something up.

Recently, my editor and I made a pact to challenge each other when communicating using our instant messaging application to use what I call vocabulary words (the words that you find on college vocabulary lists). In this way we hope to sharpen one another’s skills and broaden our language use. Our goal is to stretch ourselves and offset some of the diminution of our vocabulary wrought by years of cranking out technical software documentation.

My fellow technical communicators, we can blaze a trail in our corporate environments, showing by our example what the written and spoken language can be. Champion the cause of quality technical communication! Keep it clear, concise, correct, and complete, but don’t surrender to lassitude or fall into the trap of conforming to the lowest common denominator. Let us set the communications bar for ourselves and others, and let us set it high.