When written words fail you - telephone hot lines offer advice on business writing

Nation's Business, Nov, 1984

MEDICAL EMERGENCY? Dial the paramedics. Legal hassle? Call your lawyer. But who bails business people out of language emergencies?

Several universities now offer an answer: a hot line ready to field questions about grammar, usage, formats and even persuasion strategies.

The school of business administration and economics at California State University, Fullerton, has a 24-hour business writing hot line--(714) 773-2704--staffed by faculty of the business writing program. The free service has been flooded with calls since its inception February 1.

"We seemed to tap a huge need," says Art Bell, the hot line's founder. "One article in the Los Angeles Times brought more than 500 letters of interest and support."

The result, he says, is that the hot line lists more than 100 of America's largest industries among its users. Almost 6,400 calls had been answered as of August 30.

Half of the calls, Bell says, involve simple matters of grammar and mechanics. "Business writers aren't sure about apostrophes, especially in its/it's (the latter is the contraction for it is). Commas also cause headaches.

"Many of us," Bell notes, "were mistaught to put a comma wherever we would pause for breath."

The remaining calls are more complex. "A chief executive officer called," Bell says, "to read his introduction to an important speech. He simply wanted objective feedback." One of the first hot line users was a midlevel manager for a major aerospace company. He needed help composing a letter asking for a raise. Two weeks later, after receiving an $11,000 raise, he called again, to thank the hot line staffers.

The most frequent question is how to address a group of men and women in a business letter salutation. "Instead of the stiff 'Ladies and Gentlemen,'" Bell says, "we suggest use of titles and company affiliations: 'Dear Members of the Board' or 'Dear Directors at Microdata.' When the last name but not the sex of the reader is known, the job title can come to the rescue again: 'Dear Supervisor McCoy.'"

Judging from the Fullerton experiment, the hot line pays in several ways. Businesses benefit by producing clear, effective documents. Faculty members who staff the hot line keep up with fresh, real-world concerns that they can carry directly into communication classes. Finally, universities and business schools reap the goodwill of the business community--goodwill that has already resulted in unsolicited financial support for the CSUF effort.

Fullerton's hot line is hardly the first. In the South, John Stratton, a professor of English, and his colleagues staff a five-year-old writer's hot line--(501) 569-3162--at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Like its Fullerton counterpart, the Arkansas hot line receives calls from throughout the country and Canada.

AT TIDEWATER Community College in Virginia Beach, Va., Donna Friedman directs a grammar hot line, (804) 427-3070. The Tidewater line is available to the general public, but Friedman estimates that "well over 50 percent of our calls are from businesses." The most frequent question in Virginia? "Whether to use is or are," says Friedman, "especially in sentences with double subjects connected by or." (In such cases, the verb must agree with the subject closest to it: "The union representative or the workers themselves are welcome to attend.")

Perhaps the most ambitious hot line, and potentially the most useful to businesses, is getting under way at the University of Southern California's business school. J. Douglas Andrews, chair of the department of business communication, describes the service, scheduled to begin November 1, as an eventual "electronic Grand Central Station." In addition to phone queries, users would be able to flash whole documents to USC's computer. There they would be reviewed and revised by content area specialists, and electronically returned.

This hottest of the hot lines will necessarily involve a fee, Andrews says--probably a combination of subscription and use charges. "We like to think of the charge as a net savings to businesses. Unintelligible letters, shoddy reports and amateurish proposals are the real expenses now being paid, in terms of damage to companies' profits and images."

Can hot lines change the way business people write and speak? "By themselves, no," Bell of CSUF admits. "They provide bandages for a major business problem. Even the best hot lines are no substitute for solid instruction in writing and speaking skills."

Businesses seeking a writing hot line close to home can obtain a free directory by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope to the Grammar Hotline, Tidewater Community College, 1700 College Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va. 23456. Business schools and English departments interested in establishing a hot line can write Art Bell, Co-Director of Business Writing, California State University, Fullerton, Calif. 92634.