“Let’s say you have been fortunate enough to be hired by a multinational corporation, like ExxonMobil, Citibank or Hyundai. Effective and efficient communication is vital, on a moment-to-moment basis. “In your ordinary rounds, you may speak to twenty or so fellow workers, executives or suppliers in the course of a day. Let’s say a maximum of fifty phone calls, meetings and other verbal exchanges.
“Fifty.”
“However, if you write a press release for your Company, it may easily be seen by ten thousand eyes. If a major news outlet picks up your press release then five million citizens will be looking at it. That is power and it is responsibility.
“Get a date wrong, or a title, or confuse the reader and you’re in trouble. Hasty, ambivalent, incomplete or unclear expression can even cost you your job, if you make a mistake in that kind of daily duty.
“Writing skills are an essential element of work, no matter what sort of duty you may be assigned.”
So why can’t educated, intelligent and sincerely-motivated employees construct a report, business letter or simple e-mail?
It is not completely the fault of DING-DONG seduction. Modern life is speedy, compressed and education around the world often does not sufficiently stress the importance of clear, effective composition.
You might excuse an engineer or factory manager for not having competent writing skills (and please note that this does not depend on the language chosen – the same failure to communicate in writing is seen in Bahasa Indonesia, English, Thai or French). The Japanese educational system is among the most admired in the world, well-funded and high-tech. Teachers complain that their students are reluctant to learn to write even the basic 1500 or so kanji necessary for everyday communication.
In short, those going into the work force are not prepared with one of the most elementary, and vital, skills of all.
So how about those paid to write? It is an awkward fact that Indonesian journalism has long been painfully incompetent, sloppy and inaccurate. Just open an edition of a daily newspaper like Republika or Lampu Hijau to witness carefree sloppiness.
I once asked a journalist, who also happened to be a motorcycle taxi driver, how many drafts he had written for an important report in his newspaper. “Draft?” He did not know what I was talking about. The very nature of word processors makes it so smooth, quick and neat to write something and then shoot it off to an editor, who will also just scan it, cut out pieces to make it fit a space in a page and send it onward again. No one is forced to look at what they have written, the way you would if you wrote it by hand – or you had a stern composition teacher growling at you.