Because firms often complain about the difficulty of finding recent college alumni who have adequate training for available jobs, The Wall Street Journal asked some noted business experts for the reasons.

These experienced business professionals and professors had many eye-opening observations. Bruce Nolop,the former chief financial officer of Pitney Bowes Inc. and E*Trade Financial Corp, offers one of the best perspectives:

Our graduates lack writing skills. While adept at crafting bullet points, they often have difficulty writing in declarative sentences and complete paragraphs—thus impeding the effectiveness of their business communications, including memos, letters, and technical reports.

A 2004 Conference Board survey of 120 corporations in the Business Roundtable concluded that most companies take written communications into consideration when making their hiring and promotion decisions and implied that many current or prospective employees lack the requisite skills. This conclusion was reinforced by a 2006 Conference Board survey of 431 human resource professionals, which cited writing skills as one of the biggest gaps in workplace readiness.

Recent graduates also frequently commit basic grammatical errors, such as using an improper pronoun (e.g. “between you and I”) selecting the wrong homonym (e.g. “compliment versus complement”) or employing incorrect diction (e.g. “appraise versus apprise”). Not coincidentally, these kinds of errors are difficult to catch with spell-check.

We can posit several hypotheses for the deficiencies:

— Students do not read very much in their leisure time.

— They spend more time playing videogames and watching TV.

— Their skills are eroded by texting and social media formats.

— Their communication habits are reinforced by peer groups.

— For some students, English is not their native language.

However, I believe the root cause of the problem is that our schools are not placing sufficient emphasis on writing and grammar. We need to change our priorities.

In particular, we should reinstate or increase our use of traditional learning methods, such as diagraming sentences, reading classic books, conducting vocabulary drills, writing essays, and preparing research papers, in addition to offering specialized courses in business communications.