I wouldn't class myself as a wordaholic (a view probably resoundingly seconded by the rest of the crew on this board), but I do have standards.

My firm uses a form of the VIT which is, I believe, not standard. It actually makes people consider the syntactic and semantic content of what they are responding to rather than just allowing them to scan for the general sense. Don't ask me for details; I don't have 'em - that's our HR people's job and one which I'm quite happy to leave them to.

Obviously, nothing in what you say surprises me, but thanks for the corroboration that it's not just a local problem. My problem is that I get involved in recruitment of people who must have a good mix of technical (for content) and written (for presentation and clarity) skills. In other words, we're hiring them for their ability to write reports as much, if not more, than for their ability to write programs, design networks, write HTML or whatever.

As a matter of fact since I started this thread off I've persuaded the general manager that a dedicated technical writer/proofreader with good mentoring skills is a necessary addition to the team, and that getting the right skills will not be cheap. It's going into the 2001/2 budget and I'll be putting the JD out to our preferred recruitment agencies at the beginning of February. The process takes about three weeks once we have identified the candidates.

Note that most of our candidates are native English speakers. Or English writers gone native in most cases, unfortunately ...

We've been tossing around ideas about how to raise the general standards of literacy (any suggestion would be MOST welcome). One suggestion was that we should use our training department to do the work. However I pointed out that the standards of literacy among the trainers (including the ones "teaching" business writing) were none too solid. This is a work in progress, unfortunately, with no agreed approach determined yet.

My ISP (ClearNet) is actually very good. They obviously have someone who can read and write without difficulty managing their site content. But, like you, I have seen some real doozies. Unlike you, I couldn't give a rat's a--, and haven't bothered trying to change them!


The idiot also known as Capfka ...