It feels like walking through a maze, with an uneven floor and bad lighting, full of dead-ends, compared to walking down a pleasant, well-lit corridor.
My main concern is the writing I see coming out of the Public Relations and Communications departments. Writing is not exactly tangential to those fields.
It wasn't always this way. What has happened?
I suspect it’s all connected to the rise of a professional management class, rather than promotion through the ranks, and management by people who’ve done the work. Nobody who’s in a position to demand better or to make sure the right people are in the right roles, actually knows WTF they’re doing outside of a spreadsheet and PowerPoint.
I am observing a lot of people in high paying jobs who don't have a clue how to do even the basics of their job (like being able to type proficiently in a job that requires written documentation).
Is your shift key... broken? No? Use it please.
“Have you taken the dog out?”
“Yes”
Vs
“Have you taken the dog out?”
“Yes.”
The second comes across as the responder being potentially irritated at the asker. I believe that this comes down to the amount of effort required to type the reply; adding a period is making the explicit choice to do so, whereas not doing so is the default. This isn’t the case for sentences in the middle of a multi-sentence answer, since a separator is needed anyways. But I find myself not adding a period even at the end of multi-sentence messages, and I automatically read any message ending with a period with a different tone than one which does not.
Maybe I’m just nuts though, that’s always an option. But with text being such a relatively limited medium for conveying emotion in short messages, I think this is a reasonable solution.