Transcript Building Writing and Grammar Skills

Writing Skills: The
‘forgotten fundamental’?
• Fewer 12th-grade students can convey well-organized
ideas
• Most students can’t provide coherent answers with
clear language, supporting details, accurate
punctuation, and creative thinking
– “By the time students graduate high school, they should be
able to produce more than disorganized self-expression or
Internet chat.”
– Communicating information and composing arguments are
essential skills in business
– Is writing the ‘forgotten fundamental’?
• Content, organization, sentence structure, grammar, spelling,
and punctuation
– Just 14% of 12th grade boys “proficient,” cf. 33% of girls
• Do you read for pleasure? (Reading scores also down)
• SAT will add essay portion in 2005
» Source: Evansville Courier & Press, 7/10/03; Washington Post,
7/10/03
Writing Skills: The
‘forgotten fundamental’?
• New data reinforces importance of teaching
employees how to effectively communicate
– Ability to write well "is now a core competence
requirement for advancement," and "workers who cannot
write and communicate clearly will not be hired and are
unlikely to last long enough to be considered for
promotion"
– Although two-thirds of workers are expected to write
business e-mails, proposals and other correspondence,
only one-third are able to do so in "clear, logical prose,"
according to the National Commission on Writing, which
surveyed 120 American corporations and 50 state
government institutions
» Source: Workforce Week, 10/23-29/05
Building Writing and
Grammar Skills
• Quotation Marks and Other Punctuation
– Always place comma or period inside closing quotation marks
– Always place semi-colon or colon outside closing quotation marks
– When question mark or exclamation point is part of quotation, place
it inside closing quotation marks
– When question mark or exclamation point is part of entire sentence,
place it outside closing quotation marks
• Subject and Verb Agreement
– Verb must agree with subject in person (speaker, person spoken to,
person spoken about) and number (singular or plural)
• Ambiguous Pronouns
– To whom does pronoun refer? (What is antecedent?)
• “I” rather than “We”