Write Better At Work

When to call the grammar police

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greengrocers_apostrophe_correctionA colleague was presenting a Jeopardy!-style game to our networking group. Her clever questions had us competing to show our knowledge of mortgage-related terms like ARM, PMI, and USDA.

Despite the dry subject, I was having fun—until a couple of unneeded apostrophes caught my eye. Suddenly I was noticing that almost every word ending in –s had an apostrophe. Some needed the punctuation to show ownership: Our bank’s policy is to require first-time home buyers to make a down payment of 3.5 percent. But most needed only –s or -es to  make them plural: Like most banks, we require a down payment.

The rule for forming plural nouns in English is simple: generally adding –s or -es is enough to show you need more than one. For some reason, many people think they need to complicate the rule by adding punctuation. Check out the produce aisle in your local grocery store. Odds are you’ll find Apple’s or Banana’s on sale. (That’s why the British call this particular error the grocer’s apostrophe.)

Did this mistake matter enough to tell my colleague about it? I didn’t want to embarrass her by calling in the grammar police for no reason. On the other hand, if she used the presentation again, she could find herself embarrassed for three reasons:

  1. Errors distort meaning. An apostrophe means one of two things: possession or a missing letter. My cat’s favorite toy means my one cat claims ownership of a plaything; my cats means I have more than one cat. It’s is a contracted form of It is; its is a pronoun like his or hers and needs no apostrophe.
  2. Noticeable errors are distracting. Once I noticed the apostrophe overkill, I was paying as much attention to the unneccessary apostrophes as I was to the content.
  3. Noticeable errors can make you look careless or stupid. Some errors matter more than others, as Maxine Hairston found.

My colleague was under the gun when she prepared her presentation, and she is generally neither careless nor stupid. I decided to email her a thank-you for her engaging presentation and mention that spell check had missed something. Fortunately she was grateful for the feedback.

If you’re now feeling insecure about apostrophes, Find and Replace can help you avoid overkill. First search for -‘s; then search again for -‘es. Each time you find an apostrophe, ask: Do I need this to show ownership or a missing letter? If the answer is no, delete the offending apostrophe and check the next one. If you’re not sure, use a good style guide to review the rules.

  • Mignon Fogarty’s explanations are quick and clear: See “9 Ways to Use an Apostrophe.“
  • Robin L. Simmons’ Grammar Bytes has an excellent summary of the rules for apostrophe usage plus some entertaining interactive exercises.

(Image by Sceptre)

Would You Hire Someone with Poor Grammar Skills?

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Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and founder of Dozuki, gives a grammar test to every job applicant. “Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English,” he writes. “I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.”

Predictably, Wiens took a lot of heat. Commenters called him arrogant, fixated, rigid, and foolish for giving so much weight to just one qualification. However,  the research bears him out.

Since 1981, several studies have found that people who make certain errors in grammar and usage are judged to be uneducated and unintelligent. Of course, that judgment can be wrong. Someone who says “Me and Mike calibrated the nuclear density gauge” might have outstanding technical skills. Nevertheless, serious grammar errors can make even a highly skilled professional seem less credible.

Which mistakes matter most?
Maxine Hairston  wondered whether mistakes that outraged teachers also mattered to business people and professionals. She surveyed reactions to various errors and categorized the errors according to how much they bothered people.

Some mistakes did not seem to matter to those who took the survey. In other words, an employer who noticed an error like “the most unique” or “the data is” would probably overlook the lapse. Some errors, however, were considered serious enough to be made only by those who were ignorant or unintelligent. Errors like I don’t need none or he brung it  were judged so negatively that Hairston called them status-marking errors.

Hairston’s study was done in 1979. Are her results still valid? While a few errors are not considered quite as serious today, several studies have confirmed that some errors are considered more serious than others and that those who make the most serious errors are perceived as unprofessional. You’ll find those studies in the Notes below.

Would you like to know if your grammar meets professional standards? Take a self-scoring grammar quiz: www.writebetteratwork.com/grammar-diagnostic/

Notes:
Kyle Wien’s “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why” is a  July 20, 2012, post on HBR Blog Network: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

Hairston’s categories of error are described in “What Business People Think About Grammar and Usage”: http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/comp3160/Hairston.Business_People.html She published the results of her study in a 1981 article “Not All Errors Are Created Equal: Nonacademic Readers in the Professions Respond to Lapses in Usage” in College English,  43(8), 794-806: http://www.jstor.org/stable/376679

Kantz and Yeats (1994) found that “a hierarchy of error does exist.” Their conference presentation, “Whose Judgments? A Survey of Faculty Responses to Common and Highly Irritating Writing Errors,” is available at http://www.ateg.org/conferences/c5/kantz.htm

In 1999, Dr. Johanna Rubba’s linguistics students replicated Hairston’s study and found that respondents still reacted strongly to nonstandard usage. Their results are discussed in “Usage Matters: A Comparative Study of Judgments of English Usage Errors”:  http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba/390/survey/Usage.matters.html

Beason’s 2001 study found that “the extent to which errors harm the writer’s image is more serious and far-reaching than many students and teachers might realize.” See “Ethos and Error: How Business People React to Errors,” published in College Composition and Communication, 53(1), pp. 33–60, available at  http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/writ465/samples/beason.pdf

Gilsdorf and Leonard (2001) found that executives were most bothered by errors in sentence structure, such as run-ons and dangling modifiers. “Big Stuff, Little Stuff: A Decennial Measurement of Executives’ and Academics’ Reactions to Questionable Usage Elements” appeared in the Journal of Business Communication,  38(4), 439-475.

A nationwide survey sponsored by the Business Roundtable in 2004, Writing: A Ticket to Work … or a Ticket Out, found that 80% of employers consider writing skills when making promotion decisions: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2154

Affect/effect

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Like many things in life, using affect and effect correctly seems simple at first. Then complications develop. However, if you follow one basic guideline, you’ll be right most of the time. Affect usually means “to influence.” Effect usually means “result.”

Affect is most often used as a verb; that is, to show action. If something changes, people might ask, How will that affect me?

Effect is often used as a noun; that is, to name something. If something changes, people might ask, Will that have a good or bad effect?

That’s fairly straightforward. To  test whether you’re using affect correctly, replace with influence. For example, the question Can lack of sleep affect performance? becomes Can lack of sleep influence performance? The result makes sense, so affect is correct.

The problem is that both words can be used as either verbs or nouns. Although affect is rarely used as a noun in everyday conversations, clinicians use the term to describe a person’s level of emotional response: The diagnosis is based on the patient’s flat affect. If you replace affect with influence here, the result is nonsense: The diagnosis is based on the patient’s flat influence.

When effect is used as a verb, it means “to cause”: The drug effected a complete cure. To test whether effect is correct, replace it with cause: The drug caused a complete cure. The result makes sense, so this usage is correct.

Want more examples? You’ll find several, along with clear explanations, at Professor Malcolm Gibson’s Wonderful World of Editing site: http://web.ku.edu/~edit/affect.html