Did you see the recent media coverage about the poor quality of writing in schools?
The results were both alarming and no surprise at all.
It looked at a study by the Australian Education Research Organisation into writing and writing instruction in Australian schools.
In short, it found kids aren’t taught to write well in schools.
And they can’t write well when they leave.
So bad were the results – taken from seven years of NAPLAN writing tests – that experts warn our kids will struggle in senior high school and after graduation when they’re required to write well.
There’s been a dramatic fall in the quality of kids writing in all areas except spelling.
This includes poor results in vocabulary, paragraphing, text structure, ideas, persuasive devices and cohesion.
In some areas, it found year nine students have the function of a grade three student. They can’t write about complex ideas in a way that readers understand.
We all pay for the results.
2016 research by author Josh Bernoff found that people in business spend 6 per cent of total wages trying to get meaning out of poor writing. Put simply, if 1,000 staff claw back 2 per cent of their time spent making sense of other people’s writing, it will save more than 500 hours a week.
Kylie Miller and I developed Get It Write to tackle poor writing at work.
We set up this program because we saw a need to build better writers across organisations – whether they are corporate, public sector or not-for-profit.
Everyone can write, but we help you lift your game.
We teach tips to help you find the right words and order them in a way that connects you with your audience.
Because when we write well, we connect with our audience, whether it’s an email to your boss or a letter to your mum.
And we save ourselves – and others – a whole lot of pain.