Are Writing Deficiencies Creating a Lost Generation of Business Writers?

Business professionals and instructors often view writing skills as one of the most important qualifications that employees should possess. However, many business employees, including recent college graduates, have serious writing deficiencies, especially in their ability to use standard English. As a result, American businesses spend billions of dollars annually to remediate these writing deficiencies (College Board, the National Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools, and Colleges, 2004). In this article, the authors examine possible reasons for these deficiencies and offer evidence that a modified context-based approach, the glossing approach, and consistent error marking can reduce the number of sentence-level errors students make.