My Bosses Have Terrible Written Communication Skills
Question Posted Wednesday August 3 2016, 6:17 pm
I just recently started my first job after college, nearly two months ago.
One thing that I have noticed is that while my bosses have excellent verbal communication skills, their written communication skills are terrible. I respect them a great deal, BUT the content that they write is absolutely horrendous. This is mainly because they are from India and English is not their first language.
There are a ton of spelling mistakes and terribly written content. I think that this could impact sales.
One of my bosses, the VP of Marketing gave me a case study, telling me to make suggestions on which content to add. While none of the diagrams or flow charts are terrible, the content is terribly written and would not sit well with a U.S. client.
adviceman49 answered Thursday August 4 2016, 12:01 pm: You do not say what you position is with the company. I understand how you feel as I too had a supervisor who although an American used the wrong words or words out of context. He would use wood for would and brake for break so on and so on.
Just what your position is depends on just what you can do. If you are in sales like I was you can take the diagrams and flow charts he/they give you scan them into a computer and fix the written content. Three of the seven of us in my region did this as a team each taking a part of whatever needing fix and fixing our section then combining our work. The benefit of doing this was we could put the content into our own words which made it easier for presentations.
If you work under them in the Marketing Department then again depending on your position, should I assume your major was marketing, if so then your responsibility would include showing them a better way to produce the same product with different wording to bring in more sales.
The key here is you don't tell them there content is horrible. You say something like, "I was looking at this and it struck me if we made a few changes in content it would make a more powerful presentation." "What do you think?"
Since they are your supervisors and until they learn to defer to your grasp of the language is better than theirs. You have to take the second chair and bolster their egos and let your idea be their thought.
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