From Signs and Signals to Artifacts and Assumptions:

Wayne Smith, Ph.D.Department of

ManagementCSU Northridge

A Student of Management Observes Communication Culture in Los Angeles

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

Rank

Error or Error Pattern

1. Wrong word

2. Missing comma after intro. element

3. Incomplete or missing documentation

4. Vague pronoun reference

5. Spelling error (including homonyms)

6. Mechanical error with a quotation

7. Unnecessary comma

8. Unnecessary or missing capitalization

9. Missing word

10. Faulty sentence structure

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

Rank

Error or Error Pattern

11. Missing comma w/ nonrestrictive ele.

12. Unnecessary shift in verb tense

13. Missing comma in a compound sent.

14. Unnecessary or missing apostrophe

15. Fused (run-on) sentence

16. Comma splice

17. No pronoun-antecedent agreement

18. Poorly integrated quotation

19. Unnecessary or missing hyphen

20. Sentence fragment

“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.”

Most Widely Spoken Languages (numbers in millions)

Language

Number of First

Language Speakers

Number of Second

Language Speakers

Total Number of Speakers

English 340 1,000 1,340

Chinese 873 178 1,051

Hindi 370 120 490

Spanish 360 60 420

Russian 167 110 277

Arabic 206 24 230

Portuguese 203 10 213

Bengali 207 4 211

Indonesian 23 140 163

Japanese 126 1 127

German 95 28 123

French 65 50 115Source: Meyer, C. (2009), Introducing English Linguistics, Cambridge University Press.

Spelling – “Dilemma” - Excel

Punctuation – mult. Errors 1

Punctuation – mult. Errors 2Language Use Errors1. Possessive

pronoun form exception

2. Parallel inflection

3. Comma splice

4. Missing definite article

5. Wrong Word

6. Pluralized Adjective

Punctuation - corrected

Punctuation – side-by-sideSFV store

LA store

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?

Semantics

Semantics – Hair cuts