WHY DO WE WRITE SO BADLY IN NIGERIA?
David Adeoye, CFA
David is the Team Lead, Transaction Advisory Services, MBC Capital Limited
I will not by any measure consider myself an excellent not to mention accomplished writer. I’m not an author, columnist, or journalist. But a part of my job in the past 12 years has included preparing, reading and reviewing documents of various types (spreadsheets, presentations and reports) from and for various categories of users. And to be frank, I do get worried by the seeming drop in the quality of writing that I encounter.
If there is a major challenge employers/managers are going to have to deal with on a massive scale presently, it is the problem of bad writing. Now almost on a daily basis, I get LinkedIn invites from people who see nothing wrong with writing their names in small letters or all capital letters. I remember my O’Level days in the mid-1990s, mechanical accuracy (under which punctuation falls) used to be a major issue for many students. Yet it only accounted for 10% of the essay score with expression, content and organization carrying the larger chunk. I wonder what the situation and quality is at that level these days.
Despite the proliferation of high-end, primary and secondary schools what I see among graduates, especially online does not show quality background. The problem manifests well on online platforms. You find people, including professionals, who write sentences and paragraphs in ALL CAPITAL letters. Curiously, we had a test in my office last year for experienced hires. One of the candidates wrote his essay in CAPITAL LETTERS all through! And that was someone asked to describe how he would address a challenging client situation.
I left an organization a few years ago and one of my major points of relief was that I escaped from the bad writing culture that was so prevalent across the company. Except for some members of the executives/senior management team, only few people could write well. Worse still, it wasn’t even considered important!
Organization is vital as well. Writing without clear paragraphs or a discernible structure makes the reader’s work far more difficult. There is a reason why hymns are written in stanzas. It has to do with the flow of thought. Even our national anthem is written in two separate stanzas! In a way that shows the usefulness of that approach, the second stanza was sometime ago adopted as the official prayer at all government functions. This removed the need for separate Christian /Muslim prayers.
How do we address this challenge? For the working generation, we need conscious hard work and study to learn, understand and apply the rules for effective writing. It won’t address all our flaws, but at the minimum, it makes us aware of our gaps. We also need to read right. Let’s learn to study materials that are written in clear, concise English. Some business/professionally authored writing will certainly help. Some high quality devotional would also be of help. Lastly get a good style guide. You can either download one for free or buy from any good bookshop.
For our children, we must train them to read intensely and to practice writing from their juvenile years through their teens. That’s when the best writers are formed.
For us all, careful and structured thought is the foundation of good writing. If our thinking is clear, our expression will be clear and our writing will be effective.
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This is a wonderful piece!
Writing for publications require much careful and structured approach, but we (younger generations) overlook it. Thanks for the information.