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From Signs and Signals to Artifacts and Assumptions:. A Student of Management Observes Communication Culture in Los Angeles. Wayne Smith, Ph.D. Department of Management CSU Northridge. Motivation at the Academic-level.
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From Signs and Signals to Artifacts and Assumptions: A Student of Management Observes Communication Culture in Los Angeles Wayne Smith, Ph.D. Department of Management CSU Northridge
Motivation at theAcademic-level • Middleton, D. (2011), “Students Struggle for Words”, Wall Street Journal, Mar 3. B8 • Schools • Stanford, Berkeley, Northeastern, Rutgers, Cornell, Univ. of Penn • Students are having trouble with multiple writing issues (e.g., sometimes too casual, sometimes not concise, sometimes not valuing writing at all) • Firms • Booz –Allen Hamilton, Morgan Stanley, General Mills • Need to train or re-train professionals on how to communicate • GMAT • The writing scores on this exam have dropped in the past three years (this could possibly be due to the number of international students) • But the WSJ should come and see the high quality of the written work submitted by my students!
Motivation at the Organization-level • Ramstad, E. (2008), “CEO Broadens Vistas at LG”, Wall Street Journal, May 21. B1 • SUMMARY: LG is a [very large, Korean] company in transition thanks to the efforts of its CEO Yong Nam. The company is trying to reinvent itself as a 21st century multinational. This requires a major shift in the corporate culture to encourage employees to ask tough questions. Another shift is the use of English as the company's language. The goal of the company is to become a global powerhouse in appliances and electronics. • WSJ: You're requiring English to be used more at headquarters and to talk to the rest of the organization. Why? • Mr. Nam: English is essential. The speed of innovation required to compete in the world mandates that we must have seamless communication. We cannot depend on a small group of people who are holding the key to all communication throughout the world. That really impedes information sharing and decision-making. I want everybody's wisdom instead of just a few.
Motivation at the Professional-level • Beason, L. (2001), “Ethos and Error: How Business People React to Errors”, College Composition and Communication, 53 (1), Sep. • 1. He provided sample writing errors to businesspeople. • 2. He then classified the “responses and images of the writer” • Error Category I: image of writer as a writer • Hasty, careless, uncaring, or uninformed • Error Category II: image of writer as a business person • Faulty thinker, not a detail person, poor oral communicator, poorly educated person, or sarcastic/pretentious/aggressive • Error Category III: image of writer as a representative • Can’t represent the company to customers and/or can’t represent the company in court
Some Errors Beyond the Reach of Current Technology • Hacker, D., and Sommers, N. (2011), “A Writer’s Reference 7th ed.”, Bedford/St. Martin’s • “[Current word processors have difficulty with]…writing context and culture, appropriate style of discourse, degree of ‘assertiveness,’ faulty parallelism, misplaced and dangling modifiers, homonyms, missing words and omitted verbs, shifts in verb tense or mood, coordination and subordination, sentence variety and fragments, run-on sentences, common redundancies, unnecessary wordiness, jargon and abbreviations, clichés, sexist language, irregular verbs, pronoun agreements and references, missing or misused commas, semi-colons, apostrophes, hyphens, quotation marks, capitalization, and problems with emphasis.”
Lunsford, A., and Lunsford, K. (2008), “Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study”, College Composition and Communication, 59 (4), Jun. p. 795
Lunsford, A., and Lunsford, K. (2008), “Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study”, College Composition and Communication, 59 (4), Jun. p. 795
“The Bottom Line” • --. (2004), “Writing: A Ticket to Work or a Ticket Out, A Survey of Business Leaders,” National Commission on Writing, Sep. • http://www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/writing-ticket-to-work.pdf • Summary Excerpts • “Writing is a ‘threshold skill’ for both employment and promotion, particularly for salaried employees.” • “People who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired and are unlikely to last long enough to be considered for promotion.” • Costs • “Based on the survey responses, it appears that remedying deficiencies in writing may cost American firms as much as $3.1 billion annually.”
Source: Meyer, C. (2009), Introducing English Linguistics, Cambridge University Press.
Punctuation – mult. Errors 2 Language Use Errors • Possessive pronoun form exception • Parallel inflection • Comma splice • Missing definite article • Wrong Word • Pluralized Adjective
SFV store LA store Punctuation – side-by-side
The “English of Business” • Sentence Economics • Do I know what counts as value and impact for the reader? • Sentence Accounting • Has message waste and message noise been minimized? • Sentence Law • What are the rules and patterns governing sentence structure? • Sentence Statistics • Has systematic uncertainty (and therefore ambiguity) been controlled for in the sentence?
