I manage a team where every year we have a graduate intake. It’s a technical role (think construction industry). All of these people put in decently written CV’s and interview well.
In a lot of cases though, when it comes to them starting the role it’s pretty clear that they are hopeless at writing simple emails. Their spelling and grammar is atrocious, they have no understanding of setting out a letter or a mail, they cannot use commas and full stops, nor do they use capitals at the start of sentences.
We need to write succinct, technically accurate replies to customers, they write as they would talk about the subject. ‘You can’t use that brick there’ - no explanation to customer of what the correct product is and why etc. Just like a child would write a sentence.
It’s not just the recent intake that are like this, I’ve noticed it over the last few years. I’m constantly rewriting their replies or helping them to word things in a better way. They totally reply on spellcheck but that will often change the word to something totally different but the writer simply does not see it as they don’t know how it’s spelled in the first place.
These are adults with good degrees, how did we lose so much written English ability? Is anyone else noticing this?