In today’s information economy, writing good English has never been so important. And as business has gone global, being able to write for an international audience that crosses both national as well as cultural boundaries adds a further dimension to good writing abilities. My new course Advanced English Skills for International Business looks at fundamental writing skills that focus on the words and the way they are constructed to deliver clear and unambiguous messages.

This post is not a plug for the course; rather it is intended to provide some background as to why I have spent the last three months alternating between developing this course and completing my Certificate in Training and Assessment, here on the Queensland Gold Coast and what I have learned along the way.

While the various business training programs developed by the Australian Industry Skills Council talk a lot about writing, editing and proofreading skills, they seem to invariably take these as a given without further explaining what these skills are all about. There are endless training courses (and what in the industry are termed ‘performance criteria’) in areas of business and government that talk about these skills but without setting out exactly what they mean. This stands in stark contrast to IT skills—such as using a word processor—that are to be found in abundance. To me this is a telling omission.

In talking with staff at the Gold Coast Institute of TAFE about this, I was told that the nationally recognised training packages are based on industry recommendations. Is Australian industry telling us that these skills no longer matter? If so it is flying in the face of trends elsewhere.

An April 2007 policy paper issued by the US Alliance for Excellent Education provided some valuable insights into the state of English writing in that country. It reported that 81 percent of US employers found that high school graduates were ‘deficient in written communication’ and unable to draft such documents as memos, letters and technical reports. Private companies in the USA were spending an estimated $3.1 billion per year on remedial writing education and government was spending an additional $200 million.

While the problem was identified as far back as the 1970s, the problem has actually grown worse in recent years and part of the problem may be the pressures on the education system whereby teachers are focused more on teaching content than they are on teaching skills.

Is the problem in Australia any different to that of the United States? I think the answer is ‘probably not’.

Writing—and writing well—is a complex activity that requires considerable practice. The grounding of course has to be in the areas of vocabulary, grammar and punctuation but beyond this there is the need to understand national and cultural aspects of communication. We Australians are a fairly direct lot. We speak and write informally and directly; but other cultures are quite different to us and what is perfectly acceptable here in Australia can be considered quite rude to others. Asia is a good example where age and social position demands a more formal and more polite interchange. Having lived and worked in Asia for almost thirty years (20 of them running my own business) I have seen Australians fail time after time because they do not understand the cultural environment in which they are seeking to operate.

Perhaps the problem has been exacerbated (no, not probably—certainly!) by the tendency now to look for short boilerplate answers to questions or multiple-choice answers. Get the buzzwords right and you are deemed competent whether or not you can put a well-argued presentation together. Text messages and bullet point presentations have also taken their toll. Many young people emerge from the education system unable to write more than a five-paragraph essay.

Beyond the basic writing skills that involve the creation of well-structured and unambiguous sentences, writers must come to terms with a wide variety of styles and formats from business letters through complex client studies and reports. This is where writing skills find their application. Today’s software allows endless opportunities from simple 1,000-word blogging to 20,000 word client reports and beyond, yet few people have the competencies to write complex documents.

When was the last time you wrote to your Telco with a problem and they answered with a written response? Not recently, I’ll wager. These days we live in a world where we interact with a call centre. Not only is it cheaper for the telcos (and others) to offshore their customer service interactions, it also overcomes the problems of finding entry-level staff who can write efficiently. Beyond these reasons, it also lets them off the hook in many aspects: they record the interaction (ostensibly for training purposes, but we all know the real reason), rarely do you get the chance to do so—so in case of a dispute, it’s your word against theirs.

So the pool of good English writers may well be shrinking. Yet, good writers are needed now more than ever before. Good quality writing will give you and your company a competitive edge and put you on the fast-track for a leadership role. Surely, its worth the effort?