Background: the Speak-Write Programme
The Speak-Write Programme is based in the English Department of Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge. Its aim is to create research-based teaching resources for use in developing advanced communication skills in the HE and business sectors.
Originally funded by HEFCE, the Speak-Write programme was established in 1997 by Rebecca Stott, who continues to co-direct with Tory Young. The original team of Rebecca Stott, Simon Avery and Cordelia Bryan investigated claims that standards of oral and written English were declining amongst undergraduates. The team researched the capacities and limitations of firstyear students with regard to the use and analysis of written and spoken English in universities across the sector, collecting examples of good teaching practice in this area. They then developed and piloted a range of innovative teaching materials. The resulting advanced writing and oral presentation resources were published by Longman in the form of four textbooks in January 2001: Grammar and Writing, Writing with Style, Speaking Your Mind: Oral Presentation and Seminar Skills and Making Your Case: A Practical Guide to Essay Writing. The materials and research have also been disseminated through a series of conferences, symposia and workshops.
Continuation funding from the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning and now the English Subject Centre enabled a consultancy service to be added to the programme. As Curriculum Consultant, Tory Young has tailored Speak-Write materials for colleagues considering integrating the books into their degree programmes and continues to advise departments across the sector. The Speak-Write Programme Office has come to be regarded as a store of practical advice and information on teaching advanced communication skills. The team continues to monitor developments and initiate debate about trends in the teaching of writing in Europe and America, particularly in its recently established partnership with the Cornell Consortium for Writing in the Disciplines.
The research project
Having completed the four books designed to enhance the oral and written skills of undergraduates in 2001, the Speak-Write team sought to explore ways in which highlevel literacy skills could be honed for professional purposes. We were aware of a number of media reports in which employers expressed dissatisfaction with the writing skills of graduates; we sought to explore the validity of such views and to examine the precise nature of the complaints. The phrase ‘poor grammar’ – often equated with ‘poor spelling’ – appeared frequently and we aimed to clarify the meaning of this phrase.
Our research and report has been written at a time of national enquiry into graduate ‘employability.’ The 1997 Report of the National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education (the Dearing Report – see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/) stated that:
Higher education needs to reflect key aspects of such changes in the UK labour market. It will need: To equip graduates with the skills and attributes needed to be effective in a changing world of work and upon which to found Humanities Degrees in Writing-Intensive Professions and manage a number of careers. […]The balance between specific subject knowledge and a broad educational base and between initial and subsequent higher education qualifications will change. (4.22)
The Dearing Report has resulted in initiatives designed to encourage and support graduates to develop skills for working life: the Department for Education and Employment regularly funds development projects on the theme through the Higher Education and Employment Development Programme. Within the HE community Subject Centres are investigating the ways in which particular disciplines and ‘the various abilities, competencies, and skills they incorporate are being profiled, both within awards, and in other contexts such as the Benchmarking Statements.’
We intended that our research into employers’ expectations of current humanities graduates could usefully contribute to the longstanding national debate about the purpose of a degree and the role of universities within society. We wanted to discover why employers appoint graduates as opposed to those without HE qualifications and how they perceive the difference. We aimed to consider attitudes of graduates and employers to ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’ degrees but without seeking to ‘justify degrees through promotion of practical aspects’ or to become reductively trapped in the ‘terminology of skills.’ 1 Instead we aimed to evaluate how aptitudes developed at university were employed by humanities graduates in the workplace.
Research objectives
As the Speak-Write project is concerned with literacy we focused our research on written communication skills in the workplace rather than other transferable life skills that may have been acquired at university. Consequently the professions we sought to examine were those usually entered at graduate level and which demand an aptitude for writing. We have defined as ‘writing–intensive’ those careers in which employees undertake substantial, often formal, writing tasks on a daily basis, rather than those in which writing was a minor concern, for instance when performed only as a means of internal, informal communication.
The aims of this research were:
• to evaluate the relevance of humanities degrees to writing-intensive careers
• to determine which skills are widely used in writingintensive careers
• to discover which writing tasks are commonly undertaken in writing-intensive careers to suggest ways in which HE departments can optimise their teaching of writing to undergraduates intending to establish careers in writing-intensive professions.
Research methods
Over a twelve-month period from January 2001 to January 2002, 26 individuals working in 10 writingintensive professions were interviewed. They came from career areas such as marketing, politics, publishing, legal advice work, local government, film production, education and research. We selected interviewees from two distinct groups in these career areas: employers at management level and recent graduates who had just started their careers. The recent graduates had completed a range of humanities degrees, including History of Art, English Literature, Film, Media Studies & Psychology, History, English & Philosophy, Modern Studies, Humanities & Social Studies, and English & German. The interviews were taped and transcribed. All interviewees were asked:
• how important is writing to your profession?
• what kind of writing skills do you use?
• what kind of writing tasks do you do?
• how useful is a degree in preparing an employee for this work?
• what could be taught in humanities degrees which would better prepare graduates for this work?
Limitations
This report deals with a sample of writing-intensive careers and does not claim to be comprehensive.
Although electronic publishers were interviewed, they tended to focus on the paper-based side of their business, and so the team was able to collect less data concerning e-writing skills than expected.
Some interviewees knew that the team had previously written the Speak-Write textbooks, including one entitled Grammar and Writing. As a result, several interviewees perceived that the team’s aim was to discuss grammar, and equated writing skills with knowledge of grammar in their analysis of education.
Findings
We asked all the professionals we interviewed to estimate the amount of time they spent each day writing, considering it in all its varieties from informal, internal emails to large-scale public reports. All spent the majority of their time in the workplace writing: they estimated between 50% and 80% of their daily tasks involved writing of some sort. Perhaps surprisingly many employees – with the obvious exception of those involved in journalism – had not anticipated the volume of writing they would undertake, nor had they perceived their writing as a strength upon entering the workplace. Furthermore it was rare for an employee’s writing skills to be formally tested or analysed prior to taking up the appointment – again journalism was the obvious exception to this.
Most employees were writing on their individual personal computers. Some interviewees felt that the advent of the PC itself had contributed to the amount of writing they were expected to do as part of their job, and as a consequence, higher level writing skills were expected of them than might have been in previous years. One local government manager commented:
When I started 11 years ago you tended to do a rough draft by hand and a typing pool would produce it. Now everybody has their own PC and they do their own minutes.
In general, the higher an employee’s status at work, the less writing s/he was expected to undertake. Instead, the focus was often on supervisory or managerial tasks, such as commissioning or commenting on the writing of others. However, the majority of managers we interviewed were communicating to their teams and clients in writing. Managers reported a change in the preferred mode of communication: memos were seen as a thing of the past, replaced by e-mail as a form of internal correspondence. The only exception to this was in secondary education where lack of PC access meant that e-mail was not suitable for team communications.
Skills used in writing-intensive professions
We asked all interviewees what they thought were the writing skills they used most in their daily work. We did not offer a list of suggested skills, as we were interested to discover the perceptions of those we spoke to.
For half of our sample of people working in writingintensive careers, the most important writing skills were concerned not with writing from scratch but with editing existing material. Fifty per cent of our interviewees specifically mentioned editing, while 33% spoke of selecting information in the form of existing text to use in writing – often using the phrase ‘cut and paste’ – a term given currency by the PC itself. Twenty-seven per cent of people we spoke to frequently engaged in the processes of redrafting and rewriting in order to improve writing or adapt existing text for new purposes. The skill of summarising a large body of text to make it accessible to a reader was referred to by 27% of interviewees. Another 30% regularly adapted writing for a given purpose – to inform, promote, entertain, argue, and so on – and spoke of the skills needed to do so effectively.
Our interviewees were as concerned with the skill of writing appropriately as with editing. Fifty per cent of them stated that they spent time each day concerned with finding an appropriate tone or register for their writing, and some also commented that this was a skill that newcomers to their professions sometimes struggled with. Despite this, very few organisations recommended existing manuals to their employees or wrote their own 7 guides to appropriate register and house style – the exception being the creative director of a free local listings magazine whose handbook specifically urged an irreverent tone. We found that new employees usually discovered appropriate register through a process of trialand- error, submitting work to their managers to be commented upon during the first few months of employment. Inevitably this often led to the style and lexis of the individual manager being regarded as the ‘correct’ one. In some professions that rely on a transitory workforce of interns and students on work placements (for instance the media and film industries), employees were explicitly encouraged to write in this way, adopting the style of their manager so that the writing could be sent out in her/his name.
The aim of all those we spoke to was to write concisely and clearly avoiding complex language or jargon. Thirty-six per cent said it was necessary to write succinctly and with clarity in order to make the experience of their readers as easy as possible. The majority of types of writing being done on a daily basis were those where a large volume of information had to be communicated in as few words as possible.
Twenty-seven per cent of our sample group saw proofreading as an important writing skill. Many were concerned not to dispatch writing which contained errors to clients and colleagues and felt that the checking of work was a vital part of the writing process which less experienced colleagues omitted at their peril.
Tasks undertaken in writing-intensive professions
The most common writing task referred to by interviewees was e-mail. For 50% of them it was the main method of communication with colleagues and clients and was perceived to have replaced the memo and often, the letter and the telephone call. The proportion of time spent each day writing and responding to e-mail was reported as high, with one individual who worked in publishing estimating that it took up 80% of her day. Some companies were sending their employees on courses to enable them to use e-mail more effectively; course content included the importance of a succinct Articles and relevant subject line, the need to employ an appropriate tone and the possibilities of other communication modes being more appropriate in some cases.
In addition to the extensive use of e-mail, 40% of the group interviewed still regularly wrote letters as part of their work. Letters were written for a variety of purposes: to complain, to persuade, to inform or to solicit business. Employees often write or draft letters on behalf of their employers and have to adapt their own styles accordingly. Several recent graduates stated that they had no experience of writing letters prior to employment. They had been given a model business letter whilst at school which had become outmoded in the intervening period and thus needed to update it in their first job, particularly in organisations with a well-defined house style.
Forty per cent of interviewees were regularly involved in writing some sort of report. The range of reports written included:
• reports on issues, e.g. a local council report on an issue for public readership
• feasibility studies, e.g. considering the possibility of a local company going regional
• reports on people, e.g. in an educational context on their progress and achievement
• script reports, e.g. analysis of the suitability of a submitted script for filming
The consensus was that reports should be written in a formal and well-structured manner. One interviewee working in marketing adopted a process for drafting reports which involved starting with a series of points and developing each into a section of the report.
Just over 25% of the sample said that they wrote notes as part of their job. These were rarely the final written product, but were part of a process of recording information to be used in a piece of writing to be done at a later stage.
Perceived usefulness of humanities degrees to these professions
Managers and employers were universally positive about the advantages of a humanities degree. When asked to define the difference between a graduate and a nongraduate, employers tended to discuss a range of skills and aptitudes that are not explicitly linked to writing, but do impact upon written skills. In particular they praised graduates’ initiative, willingness to take decisions, ability to source and assess information and to structure arguments. The skill of distilling oral and written texts into an accurate summary or series of pertinent points for future reference is one that is particularly developed in undergraduate study in the humanities.
[Graduates have] the ability to put arguments together in an extended
way: an ability to reason and argue.
Product Marketing Manager
Essay writing is a key skill; the ability to structure and develop
an argument.
Legal adviser
Most employers did not feel that linguistic ability had declined in graduates over recent years. Despite the media concerns about poor writing skills that had initiated this research, only one of our interviewees expressed strong concern at the grammar of contemporary graduates. One magazine editor noted that:
A lot of people like to think that modes of writing are fixed when in fact they are like modes of speaking and change. This is a major factor behind the complaints.
There were contradictory opinions about spelling and grammar. Many employees were forgiving of minor spelling errors or typos. The very poor spelling and grammar skills of one recent graduate in our survey had not prevented him from securing a high-profile job and achieving a first-class degree from Oxbridge. Most employers stressed the importance of correct layout, good grammar and spelling, however, and pointed out that such errors have a damaging impact on the reputation of the company when sent to the outside Humanities Degrees in Writing-Intensive Professions world. Several employers also pointed out that a covering letter with as few as three errors would provide reason to eliminate that applicant in a competitive job market where other letters were impeccable. Curriculum vitaes and application letters were the most common contact employers had with recent graduates and much of their analysis of graduate skills was based upon them. Several commented that in writing-intensive professions, employers were inevitably more able to recognise grammatical errors. There was however, no general consensus and even some vagueness as to what the term ‘grammar’ actually referred to.
In our sample all the employers and recent graduates who expressed a preference favoured academic over vocational degrees. In part this seems likely because the aptitudes they value – the ability to study independently, gather, evaluate and synthesise material into a written form – are those taught or acquired during the conventional staple of humanities degrees, the essaywriting process. On the whole however, whilst employers recognised the advantages of humanities degrees, recent graduates tended to perceive them as unrelated to their activities in the workplace. One clear trend can be discerned in our sample: the more time that had elapsed between the interview and graduation, the more positive interviewees were about the value of their degrees. The most recent graduates did not seem to recognise the transferability of skills developed during study, instead they regarded degrees as distinct from their experience of the workplace because their specific subject expertise was not called upon on a daily basis. Most felt that their writing had improved whilst at university but could not always define the improvements. Recent graduates tended to be more articulate about the skills they had learned at school; they were more able to analyse what they were taught there and how useful it is to them in the workplace. This seems likely to be a consequence of the fact that at school writing skills are explicitly taught, rather than incidentally commented upon as so often happens during degree study. Furthermore, the graduates we interviewed tended to focus upon the tasks undertaken rather than the skills gained and thus, for instance, could not relate the relevance of essay-writing about their degree subject to the writing tasks of their career.
Most interviewees noted that nowadays a degree is almost a compulsory qualification; many of the recent graduates were employed in positions that would have been formerly undertaken by school leavers. Consequently, upon entering the workplace, many new employees have different skills to their predecessors, and the nature of their jobs is changing as a result. One senior commissioning editor described this situation:
It’s noticeable that people’s educational qualifications are rising because the kind of person who would have applied for the job [of assistant] 10 years ago would maybe have been a bright girl, usually, leaving school at 18 going on to a secretarial and possibly computer qualification […] and this would then be a second job. That sort of person doesn’t really exist any more. That kind of person is going on to do a degree and getting a broader education and a more imaginative education, but not the traditional secretarial skills.
When asked what universities could usefully do to improve the writing skills of graduates for the workplace most of our interviewees expressed the opinion that detailed training relating to specific professions was not an appropriate function of universities. They felt that professional writing skills were too specific to particular jobs and even particular organisations within those professions to be effectively taught at university. Most of the graduates in our sample had gone on to take professional qualifications or postgraduate work after completing a non-vocational degree and felt that this was a more appropriate place to hone specific skills. Those without such vocational training had acquired their skills within the particular context of their workplace.
However, it was clear that both employers and recent graduates felt that a university education should improve an individual’s writing skills. Most recent graduates had embarked upon HE with the intention of advancing their communication skills. Both groups in our survey favoured the idea of such skills being taught more explicitly within the disciplines. The value of the transferable writing skills we identified above such as editing, awareness of appropriate language for specific audiences and purposes, writing with concision and clarity, was recognised by employers as something which could be emphasised more explicitly within HE. Some recent graduates were also in favour of optional modules on grammar:
I often wish I’d been taught [grammar] at school or even university. I would have liked the option to study grammar at university. I think it would be very useful.
Many thought that their IT skills could have been enhanced during undergraduate study and one felt that some training in writing for presentations would have been helpful.
Recommendations
It was clear from our survey that many recent graduates are unable to articulate or are even unaware of the transferable skills they refined at university which are essential to their professional lives. We strongly recommend therefore that students are encouraged to reflect upon the aptitudes they have developed in HE and their relationship to the workplace. Such reflection could take place within a synoptic review, in which students are asked to analyse the development of their written work from the first year to their finals. Moreover, it is worth noting that the recent graduates we interviewed were all in high-level employment; it seems likely that there are unemployed graduates who would particularly benefit from explicit assessment of their expertise. Synoptic reviews should take place within specific disciplines rather than as part of a generic university-wide programme that students find hard to relate to their own programme of study.
At present grammar is taught and corrected in an ad hoc way in most HE institutions. Some tutors correct grammatical errors in a student’s essays whilst others read for content alone. This variation in response to this aspect of undergraduate writing sends confusing messages to students about the status of their writing and the importance of grammar itself. Clearly the teaching of grammar in HE is a contentious issue, unlikely to be resolved in agreement by the HE sector as a whole. Whilst some feel that grammar should be taught at school – and thus if undergraduate grammar is poor it is because schools have ‘failed’ – other institutions recognise that writing development is a lifelong process. This problematic issue is not going to disappear and needs to be addressed by individual universities and departments in order to implement consistent policies within them that will improve student performance.
References
1 Rylance, Rick and Simons, Judy. ‘The really useful company: Graduates, employment and the humanities.’ Critical Quarterly 43.1: 73-78 6
