Resolving a Usage Meltdown

Damon Young lost composure and commonsense, if not his linguistic flair, in writing "A Letter to That Man Who Emailed Me to Correct My Grammar" for The Washington Post. As a fan of the ain't, I have no problem with Young using the word, but I cannot understand why he walked into the trap of engaging in a foolish intellectual assault on the person who wrote him about stumbling over two misuses of standard English: it ain't for it isn't and these for those. Maybe the writer's closing order made Young's blood boil: "You do good work; don't try to sound like you are still in the street." 

I will not defend the writer's arrogant intolerance of Young's usage, but seeing a Washington Post columnist open an essay with "I'm better at this than you are at everything you do" seems so radically puerile. How does he know who his critic is? Maybe she's a Nobel Prize-laureate in physics. Perhaps he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Or a MacArthur genius lawyer who fights for equal access to the law. Or a great chef, or clothing designer, or government employee or minister or police officer or mother. Reread Young's opening sentence. What was he thinking when he wrote everything?   

In his article, Young reasonably explains that "rules of grammar are mostly suggestions." But notice how closely he adheres to standard English rules, beginning with the article title. He uses who instead of the more common nonstandard that. He uses man, although I doubt he asked the writer their sex (we can't tell by names only these days) or sexual identification (you know what I mean), which would be more in line with fashionable usage. Incidentally, I have been referring to Young as he/him/his because he does so on his website.

Young then refers to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison as ghosts, simply because they are deceased. I will not doubt that Young has the potential to reach Baldwin's and Morrison's legendary accomplishments and artistic mastery, but he has a long way to go. And if he does attain that pinnacle of literary achievement, it will be in large part because he learned a lot from those writers. I won't criticize Young's favorites, Raven Leilani, Cole Arthur Riley, Doreen St. Félix, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; therefore, Young should not dismiss Baldwin and Morrison as irrelevant. He likely wishes he could be such a ghost.

I prefer ain't for practical, not aesthetic, purposes. English has "standard" contractions of all types (e.g., are not = aren't, is not = isn't, was not = wasn't, were not = weren't), except for am not. The pure contraction amn't has been out of favor for centuries, so why not use ain't?  As for them white boys instead of those white boys, Young is relying on a vernacular. Man people from my neck of the streets, the Bronx, has more than once said something like "I know them guys." Young should have the liberty to write as he pleases. 

Young errs gravely in other parts of the article. He writes "sentences are music." Wrong. A sentence is a  collections of words to transfer meaning; music is a combination of sounds to make harmony. Writers can only try to make their words seem musical. But they are not. He also says of his own writing, "I'm not even that good." Even though he says so merely to further belittle the person who wrote him, he actually is that good. Good enough to have a Washington Post column. Good enough to usually write with authority and credibility. Good enough not to lower himself by attacking his readers so acerbically and brazenly. In addition, he writes that as a 10-year-old, he needed to see ice hockey Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux handle a puck on the ice for only 15 seconds to know he was great, "Because talent always speaks the same language" even though he claims, "I don't know jack about hockey." Wrong and wrong. It takes a deep understanding of a team sport to understand why some athletes rise above their peers. For Michael Phelps and Allyson Felix, we maybe can count their medals to determine their greatness; for Ernie Banks, Charles Barkley, and Tony Gonzalez, we need to look deeper, and not just at their statistics, not with the experience of a 10-year-old. And talent surely does not speak the same language, not even metaphorically. Most middle schoolers know that such a claim is false. How can we compare the talent of landing a disabled passenger plane on the Hudson River or of saving a family from a building inferno while wearing 45 pounds of equipment restricting one's movement to fashioning an exquisite sentence?  from Finally, Young fragilely considers correction of his usage "anti-Blackness." As a writing teacher, I have heard countless Black people tell me that their mothers corrected them for using ain't. And White folks use ain't as much as Blacks do.

Dare I advise Damon Young after reading his tirade? Here it is, something I tell all my students: It's all right to  draft when you're emotional, but allow a cooling-off period before pressing send. Just write, Damon Young, and appreciate your readers—or you shall lose them.

Listening for Punctuation

Reading aloud during the editing phase of the writing process reaps benefits. For one, it helps writers pick up awkward phrasing that a silent reading might ignore. Reading aloud would more likely detect the misplaced quickly in the sentence I want to pick up quickly errors. For typos, you can leave this task to the read-aloud feature of your word processing software. It will read verbatim the sentence I found man errors, so you can change man to many. 

Reading aloud will also help you determine punctuation. Here are three cases in point.

1. If you have questions please call Adam. If you read deliberately, you will hear a slight pause after questions and insert the comma after it. Even if you read superfast, you'll hear at the least a dip and rise in volume between questions and please, where the comma belongs. 

2. When she called the customer said he was shipped the wrong item. This is another case of the introductory comma but with a twist. Without the comma, you might not pause until customer and realize the rest of the sentence is senseless. Then you would correctly insert the comma after called. 

3. I am not in the office, I am in the conference room. Many people would think the comma correctly punctuates this sentence, but reading aloud would help editors decide that the comma is improperly setting off two complete sentences. They would then replace the comma with a semicolon or a period, or they would place but after the comma.

Yes, you can hear punctuation, so read sentences aloud when editing.

Explaining Exclamation Points

The question keeps arising: “What do you think of all these exclamation points people are using these days?” My opinion matters for at least three reasons. First, I work as a writing consultant in the private and public sectors, so people often rely on my expertise in deciding appropriateness of usage for themselves and their staff. Second, I have been tracing the increasing appearance of explanation points in routine business emails, which have entirely replaced traditional memos and letters as formal means of company communication. This trend suggests an evolutionary practice; therefore, the pervasiveness of exclamation points is here to stay. Third, the opinions I heard range wildly, from “I just think they’re cool” to “These idiots who use too many are immature writers.” Neither of these observations is helpful, because even informal writing requires more standards than does formal speaking to save the audience from ambiguity, especially in a business world demanding clear interpretations and precise commitments. Here is my take.

While anyone’s judgment on the appropriateness of exclamation points is subjective, I need to start with two disclosures: I use them sparingly, and I challenge anyone who claims their usage is generational. While younger people, millennials in particular, might have started the phenomenon (although I am not entirely convinced they did), I see plenty of baby boomers using them these days.

Using exclamation points excessively may represent a lazy shortcut for explaining how writers feel. Instead of writing to a teammate, “Thank you for your call!” you can write, “Your call came just as I was thinking of how we can inexpensively solve this problem while not interrupting the project. Your recommendation achieved those two objectives for our team. Many thanks for your contribution.” Exclamation points can also signal an ineffectual masking for weaknesses in using language skillfully and delicately. Better than writing to a client, “I can’t do the job today!” is writing, “While my production commitments preclude me from completing the job today, I can have it ready for you by tomorrow evening.”

With these thoughts in mind, I offer two tips:

1. Use exclamation points to express pleasure, not anger or disappointment. Think of using them to congratulate someone for an accomplishment or to thank someone for doing you a favor. Avoid “You are wrong!” “How could you!” “No way I’m doing that for you!” and the like.

2. Limit exclamation points to one per message. I restrict my use to maybe one in a month of hundreds of emails. Overuse loses their effectiveness in conveying your intended meaning. Make exclamation points matter.

BOOK BRIEF: Learning from a Master

The Essential Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, editors. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 819 + xxxiv pages.

Just for the sake of learning about yourself in the context of your own time and its place in literary, socioeconomic, and geopolitical history, The Essential Tagore is an endless adventure. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian laureate of Nobel Prize for Literature, apparently never exhausted his oeuvre across so many genres during his seven-decade career. He produced long-lasting fiction and poetry as a child, and dictated his last creative works on his deathbed traveling the world over several times in support of much more than his literary endeavors. He was also an educator devoted to redirecting children from a stifling traditional schooling system to a more creative learning environment, as he highlighted in his Nobel acceptance speech, included in this collection. The Bengali author lived when his beloved country contended with poverty exacerbated  draconian public policies, India pushed toward independence from a recalcitrant United Kingdom, a centuries-old conflict intensified between his Hindu and Muslim compatriots, and the world survived more than two horrific global wars. 

Reading Tagore is like contemplating the totality of human experience. This massive volume opens with two in-depth, reverential, engaging essays by the editors about Tagore's literary vision and biography. Each of the ten following sections divide his writing by letters, autobiography, nonfiction, poetry, songs, stories, novels, drama, humor, and travelogue. This partitioning is not as easy a task as it may seem, as Tagore’s humor might come in the way of a children’s play, his letters burst with polemic pondering as well as poetic imagery, and his fiction and poetry can be equally narrative and lyrical. As abundant as the book is, the editors’ prefatory notes to each section frequently describe how limited the collection actually is. Much of this prodigious literary giant’s work is difficult  to translate into English or accompanied by the author’s artwork, beyond the scope of the compilation. The editors refer readers to numerous other Tagore collections, which the present volume will inspire readers to investigate.

While Tagore was a fierce human rights advocate, he did not always walk lockstep with Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vision for an independent India. On the salt and cloth boycotts, he wrote, “We have killed diversities in opinions and actions and have termed it national unity. ... All we see around us are signs of divisiveness, of separation. When this difference is very strong, we are unable to establish our rule or tenets in our own land. So, someone else will govern over us—nothing we can do can prevent that from happening.”

Tagore surely struggled with the contradiction of his best intentions of seeing equality among all Indian citizens and reaping the benefits of farmers’ labor as a landlord. Nevertheless, at the center of his philosophy is an awe of natural world and a deepest respect for humanity. Read and reread his poem “I Saw in the Twilight” as ample testimony, and continue capturing other delights from this genius throughout The Essential Tagore, a classic by any standard.

The Resourceful Reporter Part 25: Parting Shots

I conclude this 25-part series on report writing, covering 23 report types that fall into 3 broad categories. I looked 9 descriptive, 9 analytical, and 5 persuasive reports. While each is unique in some respects, they all share common features. The talking points spread throughout the series (e.g., problem, cause, options, solution) should prove useful in reflecting on the world reports when designing them and establish your own standards. With this thought in mind, I offer these finals tips and cautions:

1. Use the talking points as suggestions for getting started, not for following inflexibly.
2. Move, add, or delete talking points to suit your organizational culture and purpose.
3. Mix and match talking points as needed, for instance, borrowing from the conference review for the course review or even the staff appraisal.  
4. Create new reports based on the templates I've created in this series. Notice I've omitted job accomplishments for descriptive reports, industry reviews for analytical reports, and white papers for persuasive reports; however, this series gives you a lot to work from if you need to write these or other reports not in the series.

OK, happy reporting!

The reports in this series:

Descriptive Reports

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews

Analytical Reports

1. Contractor Appraisals
2. Staff Appraisals
3. Self-Appraisals
4. Audit Reports
5. Root-Cause Reports
6. Business Forecasts
7. Project Plans
8. Project Status Reports
9. Project Completion Reports

Persuasive Reports

1. Internal Proposals
2. Justification Reports
3. Business Cases
4. External Proposals
5. Business Plans

The Resourceful Reporter, Part 24: Business Plans

The twenty-third and final report of this series is the business plan. We usually associate a business plan with entrepreneurs. But employees of profit and nonprofit organizations with an entrepreneurial spirit should understand the business plan's function and strategy because they cross over to many business activities. 

A business plan is a detailed strategic tool stating the rationale and approach for achieving business goals. The author could be an individual, business unit, or company. The intended readers could be internal or external: management, staff, potential funders, clients, or the general public. Business plans can examine for executives the feasibility of a strategy, announce to staff a multiyear operational approach to staff, or seek from funders financing to underwrite operations, among other purposes.

In the planning stage of composing the business plan, the authors conduct either or both of these analyses:

• SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) of the internal strengths and weaknesses of the company, as well as the external opportunities and threats toward achieving its goals
• 5 C analysis of one internal factor (company) and four external ones (customers, competitors, collaborators, and climate), urging a SWOT analysis of all 5 C's.

Internal business plans to management usually have these parts:

• executive summary, providing an overview of all the content
• situation analysis, reviewing the SWOT/5C
• operational plan, describing the promotional, sales, or operational approach
• management team, detailing the qualification and responsibilities of the team
• financial plan, covering the resources needed and return on investment

External business plans to funding sources might discuss a similar executive summary, operational plan management team, and financial plans. But it substitutes the situation analysis for two other parts:

• business description, listing the company's vision and mission statement as well as the market opportunity 
• market analysis, explaining what makes the company's approach advantageously different from the competitors' approach, and what the company's needs

 Other reports in this series:

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews
10. Contractor Appraisals
11. Staff Appraisals
12. Self-Appraisals
13. Audit Reports
14. Root-Cause Reports
15. Business Forecasts
16. Project Plans
17. Project Status Reports
18. Project Completion Reports
19. Internal Proposals
20. Justification Reports
21. Business Cases
22. External Proposals

The Resourceful Reporter, Part 23: External Proposals

Using an internal proposal template to write an external proposal would be a futile timewaster. While a careful audience analysis is necessary for either document, far too many external proposals focus on the writer's strengths, not the reader's needs. I see this major weakness wherever external proposals appear, including in major corporations that have the resources to know and do better. 

Beware of writers who compose me-focused messages; they are lazy and selfish, uninterested in their prospective clients' concerns and likely proposing a costly, ineffectual cookie-cutter approach to complex problems or opportunities. If you've seen as many external proposals as I have, you are familiar with the several-page-long narrative explaining the service provider's elite qualifications. This approach seems so foolish. The proposing firm was invited to submit the proposal foremost because it is so well known. So why spend so much copy on the obvious?

After expressing appreciation for the opportunity to propose a solution to a problem or a strategy for a project, external proposals should show a deep understanding of the client's business, aims, and needs. A SWOT analysis would be in order during the planning stage of the proposal, even if it does not appear in the final draft. Your job? To fill the client's competency gap toward achieving their goal. The better you explain the case, the more the client will realize your grasp of the industry and command of the situation.

Next comes your proposed approach, detailing your qualifications, strategy, scope of work, investment request, disclaimers, and contingencies, if any. Even this part of the proposal should spin toward your client's needs and interests.

 Other reports in this series:

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews
10. Contractor Appraisals
11. Staff Appraisals
12. Self-Appraisals
13. Audit Reports
14. Root-Cause Reports
15. Business Forecasts
16. Project Plans
17. Project Status Reports
18. Project Completion Reports
19. Internal Proposals
20. Justification Reports
21. Business Cases