In Business You Need to Write

Who could have ever suspected that the burgeoning universe of instant communications would expose an entire population of professionals, college grads and business executives who share an embarrassing secret?

They lack the ability to write a complete, coherent sentence.

It's harder and harder to hide upscale borderline illiteracy in the era of on-demand personal communications. Gone are the lazier days of, "Miss Smith, take a letter," and gone are the letters themselves, that were more style than substance. The real business of selling, buying and horse-trading took place elsewhere in those days. Letters merely confirmed or regretted.

What trips up many of today's closet anti-writers is both the directness and the informality of business e-mail and faxes, a correspondence caught between two worlds, where professionalism is expected, but so are conciseness, clarity and speed.

For the businessman or woman who failed to grasp writing rudimentaries in school or on the job, there's no more room for verbosity and double-speak, hiding under a commanding corporate logo or sprawled across thick, expensive letterhead.

It's estimated that some 35 percent of today's bosses still don't answer their own e-mails, but toss that simplest and quickest of tasks to a subordinate who'll essentially ghost-write the response.

And with downsizing, outsourcing and lean-and-mean in the workplace, that crutch could be removed without even a moment's notice.

With the fax-scanner-printer combo quickly becoming the business world's great equalizer, where do you fall on the scale of corporate literati?

Don't Write ... Communicate!

If you're the kind of guy who thinks he couldn't write his way out of a paper bag ... or the kind of gal who prays nightly in thanks for spell-check ... or even an aspiring writer who's busy papering the wall with rejection slips, take heart from knowing one fundamental truth:

If you can speak so that people will listen, you can write so that people will read.

You don't have to go back to school, but you do have to practice, practice, practice! It won't be a chore at all if you remember three little rules: