justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

Writing competence = intelligence?

Each semester, I pose the following question to the students in my community college business writing course:

Does your writing competence 

influence how people judge your intelligence?

Over the years, the comments made by my students are somewhat mixed, with a few more disagreeing with the statement than agreeing with it. Regardless, (or “irregardless: as far too many people say), I believe that one’s writing competence precedes any other information that a person may use to judge someone’s intelligence– whether that’s fair or not.

On September 4, 2014, Seth Godin – the world’s most read business and marketing blogger, wrote a blog entitled, Does "stationary" matter?

Seth made the following statement: “I have trouble buying paper and pens at a store that cares so little about competence that they've misspelled the very thing they sell on their sign.”

Question: Does that matter to you?

Answer: It does to me!

I understand that spelling ability or the choice of a word is not necessarily a reflection of a person’s or an organization’s intelligence, but it does reflect the lack of attention to detail, quality, correctness, and even professionalism of a person or organization.

It would be very easy to side with those who feel that spelling ability is not related to intelligence. I had poor writing skills – spelling, punctuation and grammar - for much of my formative years. In college, I failed the upper division writing test and had to attend a “Bonehead English” class to improve my writing skills. Fortunately, my section was taught by an innovative instructor –my favorite professor – who felt the only way to learn to write was to write. We were assigned seven topics each week that required at least 500 words. We then had to correct one classmate’s papers – and this went on for 15 weeks – meeting briefly once a week, with no instruction being given. From that experience (and getting tired of all those “red pen” marking on my papers), I learned to punctuate correctly, use proper grammar, and most importantly, spell the words I liked to use and avoid using those that I had difficulty spelling- opting to find other words, if necessary. (By the way, I passed the upper division writing test at 96%!)

You see, I learned to respect the reader’s intelligence by enhancing my spelling, grammar, and punctuation skills and reducing the possibility of having my intelligence judged solely on the basis of my writing competency. 

What do you think?