Bad Writing Exercise Dr. Scott W. Kunkel University of San Diego

The following is a real business letter, sent from a sales manager to a customer, Cindy Jones. The next 3 slides are the letter 1.The whole letter so you can see it is genuine. 2.The top half of the letter enlarged so you can read it more easily. 3.The bottom half enlarged. This letter contains over 40 grammatical, spacing, capitalization, punctuation and style errors. See if you can find at least 25 errors in the next 5 minutes. (I’ll give you the first 5.)

Here is the whole letter so you can see that it is genuine.

I’ll give you the first 5 errors: 1.No date. 2. The street should be Clairemont Dr. 3. There should be a unit number, The zip code should be Too much space between address and “Dear.”

Here’s the rest of the letter. Now, see if you can find at least 25 more errors. Find all you can – don’t stop at 25. Remember, there are over 40 errors to find.

Now that you’ve edited Wes’ letter: What do you think of Wes? What adjectives would you use to describe him? Would you buy a car from him? Would you hire him to work for you? Does his poor writing cause you to question his competence in other areas?

“When customers see coffee stains on our pull-down trays, they assume we don’t do our engine maintenance right” (Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines).

What Conclusions Can You Draw? Did Wes’ letter make you lose respect for him? How do YOU want to be perceived by others? The way you perceived Wes? What did Wes do wrong? What should he have done? What is the solution?

What is the value of this exercise? What did you get from it?