Engineers have horrible written communication skills. Call it a pet peeve of mine, but this is one issue that consistently annoys me. Not that I am the prince of prose myself, but I feel confident in saying that 13 years of grade school and 5 years of college have taught me how to assemble complete sentences.

I once told a young engineer (while handing him a technical report bleeding in red ink), “They say that, given enough time, a room full of monkeys with typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire written works of Shakespeare. This paper: 2 monkeys, 10 minutes.” This guy had just graduated from one of the premier technical colleges in the nation, yet somehow basic grammar had failed to register as a prerequisite to entering the real world. It’s bad enough when our interoffice correspondence and technical writing lapses into caveman-speak, but allowing such gibberish to find its way into our business development communications is a sin of the highest magnitude. The following is an actual message that I received this week from a surveyor trying to win my business:

Dear Mr. Whitaker,

We would like to THANK YOU for all your hard work and dedication,

Every company would be glad to have a person like you in their Staff,

Your friends and relatives should be proud of your performance.

WARE MALCOMB could not be at this level of success without your great contribution to the company.

We hope that you and your company will continue in the same direction.

We at Smart Land Surveying would like to use this opportunity to offer our Land Survey Services again

In any way to help you to reach your goals and targets,

All our experienced Staff is ready at your command when you need it–and at a very competitive rate.

We do not give up resources to give you a great quality.

Thank you so much in advance.

First of all, just so you don’t think I’m being facetiously cruel, that’s the actual name of the company – Smart Land Surveying – I didn’t make it up. I’ve never spoken with this guy; but to be fair, I suspect that there is a language barrier here and that his message is the victim of a poor translation. I understand that some things simply don’t translate into English very well – Business names like “Happy Joy Sushi” come to mind. HOWEVER, there is no acceptable excuse for poor grammar within the context of professional written business correspondence. Run a grammar-check. Use a dictionary or a thesaurus. Pay someone else to write it for you. Just don’t tell me how great your services are until you’ve learned the correct use of paragraphs and periods!

Does anyone else out there in the blogosphere find this trend disturbing? Send me your examples of bad professional writing. I’ll post the worst ones on the Wall of Shame.