Grammar, a Victim in the Office – WSJ.com

When Caren Berg told colleagues 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 Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.

“I cringe every time I hear people misuse “is” for “are,” Mr. Silver says. The company’s chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with “like.” For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. “I am losing the battle,” he says.

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 communications 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 training and 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.”

Leslie Ferrier says she was aghast at letters employees were sending to customers at a Jersey City, N.J., hair- and skin-product marketer 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.

via Grammar, a Victim in the Office – WSJ.com.

Strange Random Grammar Quotes:

“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.” ― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children

“Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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• Does grammar matter anymore? (LOL) (cbsnews.com)
• Between You and I, is Standard Usage and Grammar Necessary in Business? (nclawlife.com)
• Grammar Gremlins: Upon review, ‘on’ oft preferred (knoxnews.com)
• Friday fun: test your grammar skills (vivianpaige.com)
• Can you Speel It? (dailypost.wordpress.com)
• About the grammar quiz in the WSJ article (proswrite.com)

Learn with “The Word Nerd”

Inspired at an early age by the work of Dr. Seuss, Brian P. Cleary is a self-confessed “word nerd“ and the author of the best-selling books “Words Are CATegorical”, in which he presents essential English grammar points in a fun style, with the help of several cartoon Cats. Although his website does exist mainly to promote these and other books he has written, there is a great deal of material that you can download in pdf form and games to play on-line.

For example, in the main area, choose the WORDS section of the filing cabinet and play games with parts of speech (adjective, adverb, verb and so on) or write a strange story by filling in the gaps on the Crazy Cat Tales. You can also download these forms as a pdf file to print and use later.

Other sections of the web are the Word of the Week (WOW), the Poem of the Week (POW), Maths help, Poetry and Phonics, but in fact, most of the objects in the main area make a sound or do something, so just explore and have fun!

In short, this is a site recommended for kids of all ages and / or cat lovers!

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Strange Random Language Fact:

A Toponym is a place name or word that began as the name of a place, such as hamburger (from Hamburg, Germany) and afghan (a soft blanket from Afghanistan).