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Written language skills do not seem to be as important to our society as they once were, thanks to the ever-evolving text abbreviations of Instant Messaging. Depending on your generation, the type of schooling you received, or your personal laziness level, you may not be familiar with basic writing rules, including spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Communication should be top of mind when dealing with others.

Beyond knowing the actual skills, there's the embarrassment factor. The more mitakes you make in your document, the higher your chances of making a fool of yourself. Do professionals not care what their intended recipient thinks? Do term paper authors not care how poorly they might be graded? Do online writers know that their writing is bad, but are not concerned enough to make improvments? The more misspellings and other mistakes your reader finds, the less he/she will trust you. Sad, but true.

A message's birthplace is in a writer's brain. Here is where you supposedly keep the nuts and bolts of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and other related details, as well as the definitions and phonetics. You should easily access all of these concepts, taking the message from your brain to the keyboard or page, and thanks to our technology-laden society, you now get to choose from a variety of different sending options.

When you're e-mailing, texting, or using any other "relaxed" media or forum, shorthand is probably allowed, even expected, and that's fine. However, there's no excuse for writing that way when your audience is your boss, co-worker, subordinate, client, professor, the general public, or anyone else you want to impress.

Your level of responsibility will dictate how your message gets to your recipient: On one side, if you get lazy and (for instance) don't check for misspellings, punctuation, etc., you're in trouble. On the other side, if you want to make sure he/she clearly understands what you write, you edit your web site, letter, article, or whatever your document happens to be.

Now the message is written and sent on its way. If you were a lax writer, the recipient at the other end gets to siphon his/her way through a jungle of misspelled words, missing commas and quotes, bad phrasing, perhaps with a few unnecessary unrelated tangents, and all possibly in one giant, page-long paragraph. Any editors out there started your depression counseling yet?

Miscommunication is rampant because too many people don't take the time to learn very simple practices that could improve their writing. We should know as a society when it's okay to abbreviate, and when it's appropriate to write out entire words in full and correct sentences. Technology is great, but following the shortest path to laziness is sending us back to the primordial ooze. We need to tune up our written communication.

Bring back Schoolhouse Rock!

Learn more about this author, Len Morse.
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