10
Plugging In: Computers and Business Communication

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Cite seven guidelines for creating visually appealing documents.

• Cite five recommendations for using a computer to help in your writing.

• State the safest policy for dealing with the limitations of privacy for e-mail.

• Describe basic copyright policies for material that appears online.

In the late 1970s, the personal computer, or PC, arrived. It was followed by the Internet, which, by about 1993, produced the World Wide Web. Together, they ushered in a revolution in communication, changing fundamentally how we live, work, and interact with one another. Now, anyone with a computer and modem can quickly send a message to as many people as are interested, regardless of where they happen to be in the world. This radical change challenges assumptions about how we communicate and how we do business.

According to The Boston Globe, as of April 1999, 33 percent of households in the United States—about 100 million people—had access to the Internet, either at home or at work (Valigra, 1999). These numbers are surprisingly evenly divided between men and women (though not, unfortunately, among racial groups or income brackets). In minutes, these people can plan and book a trip, compare the tax advantages of investments and complete a transaction, or post an opinion to be read and responded to by people thousands of miles away.

According to a study done at the University of Texas business school, the U.S. Internet economy in January 1999 weighed in at an astonishing $301.4 billion. Even more significant to managers, perhaps, is the size of business-to-business transactions, known as B2B: $64.8 billion that year (Lucier, 1999). The synergy made possible by computers and the Internet means, among other things, that businesses can keep inventories low and hire workers on an as-needed basis. It means, too, that the workers they do hire will be those who know how to make good use of communication technology.

With all this, it is impossible to do business in the United States today without some degree of computer literacy. In this chapter, you will learn how to take advantage of current technologies as writing tools. You also will find guidelines for creating documents that are visually appealing. Finally, you’ll be introduced to a few of the legal and social issues raised by the prevalence of computers in the workplace.

WRITING BY COMPUTER

To begin, we need to look at how a computer influences the writing process. Its greatest advantages are speed and ease. Not very long ago, people wrote in longhand or on a typewriter, then revised with cross-outs, arrows, and cutting and pasting. Next, they sent their work off to be retyped and corrected with erasures and a lot of correction fluid. Copying required carbon paper or mimeograph machines, and everything took time, energy, and resources.

Then came the PC and we were saved—or at least saved work. With a computer, you can write, edit, and store your writing at the touch of a few keys; insert and delete words or phrases; move blocks of type around to find the best flow of ideas; search for words that you want to alter or eliminate; copy documents and merge them into one another; and store and call up frequently used text. You can communicate widely, while individualizing your messages. With desktop publishing, you can create documents that look professional, allowing you to become your own publisher. And you can do all this with a convenience and speed that were unimaginable only a few decades ago.

The computer is a wonderful tool, but it is still just a tool. Though it can make writing easier, it can’t write for you or make you a better writer, claims of some software programs to the contrary. The computer also sets some traps for unwary writers. These aren’t unique to computer users, but the sheer ease of writing on a computer exacerbates some old problems.

Wordiness: Delete

The first danger is wordiness. It takes such little effort to write words that sometimes they can flow too freely. Also, because only part of a page appears on the screen at one time, it’s hard for writers to get a sense of the length of a message until it’s printed out. Though you can scroll through a document and scan its length, you don’t get as clear a sense of long-windedness as when you see sheets of paper piling up.

For a long piece of writing especially, it is a good idea to print it out and read it in hardcopy at least once while revising so you can read it as another reader would. Interestingly, messages read differently on a computer screen than on a piece of paper. Also, you’re more likely to catch errors when you proofread hardcopy than when you proofread on a computer, and it’s easier on your eyes.

Presentation: The Eyes Have It

The second potential pitfall involves format. Computers put a variety of typefaces at your disposal, and they make it easy to indent, create columns, or festoon your message with lines and graphics. These graphics can make for a visually interesting document, but they also can be too much of a good thing. A page with underlining, italics, boldface, five different styles of type, and lists highlighted with bullets and asterisks shouts, “Look at me!” rather than, “Understand me.”

In a written document, the goal of good visual design—that is, a message that looks clear, neat, and attractive on the page—is the same as the goal of good writing: to encourage reading and understanding. If the page looks too busy or the graphics interfere with clarity, your message may be put aside—forever.

The seven guidelines listed in Exhibit 10–1 will help you create visually appealing documents to encourage readers to give your writing the attention it deserves. These guidelines apply no matter what method you use to prepare your message, though they are easiest to do on a computer.

Guidelines for Electronic Writing

The guidelines you’ve learned in this course apply to all writing, regardless of the technology used to produce it. However, new technology allows for, and in some cases demands, different practices. The following are a few basic recommendations specific to writing by computer.

1. Use your computer to brainstorm and organize your ideas, as suggested in Chapter 2. The ease of altering what you write and editing out extra material frees you to throw anything into your early drafts, knowing you’ll get rid of extra material as you revise.

2. Use the editing feature in your word processing program that helps you find and eliminate flat language and passive constructions, such as there are and due to the fact that. Also use your spell checker to help you identify misspelled words. However, don’t rely solely on either of these commands to make your writing effective and correct.

3. Save your writing often as you work, and store it on a backup disk. This seems like an obvious warning, but everyone who has ever written on a computer has a tale of woe about lost or irretrievable documents. If you save your writing, power surges or failures won’t wipe out a morning’s work and neither will human error. Keeping your writing on a disk won’t save you from computer viruses, but it will give you a backup in case your machine contracts a virus.

4. Print out your writing at least once before your final rewrite. This allows you to read it as your reader will.

5. Limit the span of time you spend writing at a computer. Focus your eyes on a distant object, stretch, get up, and move around. Taking frequent breaks is a mental necessity as well as a physical one because a break can refresh your ideas and your language.

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION

E-Mail

E-mail is now common in personal and business communication. Of those with Internet access, 84 percent use e-mail (Lucier, 1999). It combines the benefits of letters, telephone calls, and face-to-face conversations, yet it is more efficient. It eliminates the annoyance of “telephone tag,” cuts down on distractions from co-workers popping their heads in with “a quick question,” allows you to prepare what you want to say ahead of time and to get your message across without interruptions from the receiver, makes it easy to share text from a distance, creates a record you can refer to for clarification, and lets you read and respond to your messages at your convenience. An interesting study done by Case Western Reserve University’s School of Management revealed that people even found it easier to deliver bad news accurately by e-mail than by phone or in person (Affleck, 1999).

The prevalence of e-mail makes it remarkably quick and easy to handle a lot of otherwise awkward or tedious communications tasks and to include many people in discussions or decision making. You can write collaboratively with people who are at a distance, get a piece of information for a report or proposal, solicit suggestions from co-workers about something you are writing, or get permission to cite someone else’s work. E-mail also lets you get last-minute information on your way to a meeting or send a quick report on that meeting as soon as it’s over, even if you’re on the other side of the world.

For all of its benefits, e-mail poses some risks in how it is used, or, more often, misused. Stories abound of people who write an e-mail message to let off steam about their boss only to press the wrong key and include that boss in the list of people receiving the message. Then there are those who include personal information or gossip in e-mail that goes astray and gets wide circulation, and still others who are indiscrete in a message that, unlike a private conversation, lives on and is seen by the wrong person. Finally, businesses have backup systems for their e-mail networks, so that even if you erase every e-mail you send or receive, copies may remain on the backup system for months.

Any communication can go awry—conversations get overheard, and gossip has a way of traveling beyond the ears it’s meant for—but technology increases the impact, almost as if someone has posted the message on a bulletin board for everyone to read. The wisest policy is to treat e-mail as you would any written business communication. Just as you should limit personal phone conversations and refrain from penning love letters at work, you should keep personal e-mail messages to a minimum and assume that all e-mail has the potential to become public communication. We will discuss this privacy issue later in this chapter. And, as for bearing bad news, the Case Western Reserve study also found that face-to-face communication was better when the news was important or the deliverer cared about the recipient.

Discussion Forums

Early on in this technological revolution, computer users realized that communities no longer had to be limited by geography. In cyberspace, people who shared an interest or perspective could “meet” and “chat” online in “virtual communities,” regardless of where they were in the physical world. From this grew electronic bulletin boards, chat rooms, and other discussion forums dedicated to specific topics, some of which offer intriguing ideas and useful information to businesspeople.

Some discussion sites allow users to communicate anonymously, which, like most things in life, is a mixed blessing. Sociologists have charted an interesting effect of anonymous electronic communication: When messages are exchanged between writers and readers who don’t know one another and who can’t see or hear one another as they communicate, people are judged solely on the basis of their messages. Without titles, hierarchies lose their importance, and, because gender, race, age, and physical appearance are unknown, they are without significance. This makes electronic communication unusually open.

But this openness can lead to a phenomenon called “flaming,” in which anonymous users don’t edit themselves at all or indulge in rants and rudeness. Most anonymous communication is less extreme, but there is still a tendency toward lowered inhibitions, so that users may write things they would never put in a regular written message. A current legal case involves employees charged with disclosing company secrets without authorization in an online discussion group. Though they thought they were posting their messages anonymously, their Internet Service Provider knew who they were, and the law allowed their employer to subpoena that information.

So, if you write for business purposes, if you use a computer at work, or if you identify yourself as part of a business, be prudent. Though online communication is usually more casual than a written letter, for instance, you should still follow the conventions of courtesy and ethical business practices that apply to all business communication.

Writing that Functions as Speech

Online communication combines the functions of writing and speaking. We send e-mail messages as if we were talking by phone, yet they are written messages. When we take part in an online forum or conference, we relate to one another as if we were in a room together, but we are communicating in writing with people we may never see. Through our writing, we may share more with our virtual neighbors than with the people we work alongside every day.

All of this calls for different ways of composing and expressing our messages. We’ve learned new vocabulary words, from ASCII to www; coined acronyms and shorthand phrases, such as LOL for laughing out loud; and adapted writing conventions, using uppercase letters to signify anger and smiley-face punctuation marks to show pleasure. We have also developed an etiquette to compensate for the impersonality of machines.

Computer communication also demands greater succinctness and organization in your writing. One of the purposes of this technology is to speed up the exchange of information, so messages that take forever to get to the point defeat that purpose. And because your message is likely to be one of many your reader receives each day, it can be easy to ignore or erase.

You must adapt your writing to these demands. When you are writing a message to send electronically to people you know and work with directly, you can tailor that message as we discussed in Chapter 1. But when you are writing to unknown readers in a virtual business community, the impact of your message depends much more on what is said and much less on how it is said.

When you are “chatting” with someone online, especially in real time, you must compose your message quickly, as if you were speaking. This allows little time to edit; in fact, you may have the chance only for a cursory glance to make sure that you typed all the words in the right order and didn’t misspell anyone’s name. At the same time, you must write knowing that your message, as a piece of writing, will have a longer life than spoken words.

The conventions of electronic conversation allow for this kind of casual writing. You usually have the opportunity to clarify, correct, or expand on something you’ve written, as you would in conversation. But be careful not to let those conventions spill over into the other writing that you do. Memos, letters, proposals, reports, and other formal or semiformal documents still require careful preparation, composition, and revision. If you plan to e-mail such documents, it’s a good idea to write them off-line and save them in a separate file, as you would other pieces of writing. In Exercise 10–1, you can practice composing e-mail messages efficiently.

Exercise 10-1: Writing E-mail

INSTRUCTIONS: Compose a brief e-mail message for the following situations. Time yourself to see how long you take to write each message. Messages will vary, but you can compare yours to the examples at the end of the chapter.

1. You need to reschedule a meeting with your Web site designers from Monday, July 8, to Monday, July 15. The time (10 A.M.) and place (the conference room) will stay the same.

2. You want to enlist the support of your co-workers for a fundraising project, the Walk Against Juvenile Diabetes, which your company is sponsoring for the second year. Last year, you raised over $300,000 to donate to a clinic, and this year you hope to do even better. You have registration forms to distribute.

3. You are introducing Leah Sulavimbi, the new engineer who has joined your team, and inviting co-workers to meet her over coffee the next day from 10 to 11 A.M.

4. You are soliciting ideas for the name of a new product: rubber bands guaranteed not to break. You haven’t been happy with any suggestions so far, so you want to encourage ideas from all quarters without offending those whose suggestions you’ve rejected.

5. Ari, your in-service training coordinator, whom you supervise, has failed to get his report in on time for the third quarter in a row, which makes it impossible for you to give credit to the employees who took part in the training. You are annoyed, but you like Ari, who otherwise is an excellent and creative worker. He thinks reports are a waste of time, and you need to convince him otherwise.

NEW ISSUES IN COMMUNICATION

Typically, businesses retain backup copies of e-mail messages for 60 to 90 days. Messages posted in online forums are also stored for a period of time before being deleted by whoever is in charge. But any message may be kept longer by recipients or people who download it, and some businesses use software that keeps records of online transactions for future review. This storage is useful, but it can make your writing vulnerable to reading, editing, copying, or deleting by someone other than you or the person you intend to communicate with. It also raises new questions about copyright, about the ownership of written material and other intellectual property, and about responsibility for what appears on your computer screen at work.

Privacy

Most electronic communication requires you to type a password to log on or get access to messages and other services. This is intended to protect your communication from snooping and unwarranted intrusion, and it should mean that you have control over who reads what is on your computer. But private files stored on a computer are much more accessible to unauthorized eyes than those in a locked file cabinet, and e-mail does not have the same guarantee of privacy as a letter dropped in a mailbox.

Federal law protects the privacy of e-mail on public networks only Businesses with private systems can legally read their employees’ electronic mail, if they choose—this means the message you send and receive, as well as what you download from the Internet. According to a 1998 survey by CIO Communications, Inc., of Framingham, Massachusetts, slightly over half of the companies they surveyed monitored their employees’ use of the Internet (Muller, 1998).

Though more companies are establishing formal policies for e-mail and use of the Internet at work, as of this writing, there is no standard procedure and no definitive legal ruling. Some companies inform employees that they intend to read their mail or monitor their Internet use; some do not but still reserve the right to do so at any time. Other businesses are concerned with file security and set up coded systems to ensure it. In still other cases, businesses take punitive action based on material one employee sees on another employee’s computer screen, even if the second employee did not intend to share that material.

This situation will probably change through legislation, lawsuits, technological fixes, or business practices. Increasingly, companies are advised to establish clear policies to protect themselves and their employees. In the meantime, if you are writing or viewing sensitive material; do not want someone to read something you have written, received, or downloaded; or are in a supervisory position where you may want to read what is on an employee’s computer, we strongly advise you to find out your company’s policy concerning privacy of electronic communication. Once you know this, you can take steps to store and protect your messages accordingly.

In the absence of a clear, comprehensive policy—and perhaps even with one—it is safest to assume that there is no such thing as privacy of electronic communication at work. It is to your advantage to treat e-mail as you would a legal company document.

Offending Material

You can find nearly anything on the Internet, including words and pictures that may offend or upset co-workers or bosses. Of course, you can find these things elsewhere too, but the immediacy and ease of access that the Internet offers have added a new wrinkle to debates over what is permissible expression at work.

In the 1990s, a category of antidiscrimination law known as “hostile environment” gained prominence. This says, essentially, that language or images in the workplace may create an environment so abusive as to make it impossible for some people to do their jobs; therefore, the presence of these words or images constitutes discrimination. Once again, the jury is still out on the validity of this reasoning and on how this concept can be applied in specific cases. Still, businesses are justifiably concerned with the image they project, and, in numerous instances, people have been held accountable for supposedly offensive material they downloaded and stored on their computer at work.

Our warning, as before, is to be cautious. You may feel that what you write or view on your computer is nobody’s business but your own, but your employer or co-workers may not agree, and they may have the weight of the law on their side. Find out what policies exist regarding Internet use at your work; be aware that you will probably be held responsible for what appears on your computer; and don’t use your work computer for non-work-related surfing, research, or play.

Copyright Protection

Copyright protection for printed material is clearly established by law: You must get permission from the author or publisher of a copyrighted work in order to quote or reprint significant portions of it. This rule holds for material that appears online, but the 1978 copyright law (which predates most electronic communication) covers material from the time it appears in “fixed form,” and that moment is not always clear for computerized writing. The ease of downloading, copying, or altering text from the Internet and the technology’s defiance of borders confuse the issue further.

U.S. copyright laws apply whenever you incorporate someone else’s writing, research, or images into a document of your own. (Laws vary from country to country, though international treaties have simplified somewhat the conditions for recognizing foreign copyright.) Much of what you’ll find online includes a notice of copyright, and some Web sites provide explicit instructions for the reuse of their material. When clear information doesn’t exist, do not assume that you can use what you come across with impunity. For example, newspapers hold the copyright to most of the material they publish, but freelancers usually retain copyright to their work, and authors keep the copyright to their books. You need to find out who can give you permission to use the work, so check with whomever has posted the material you want to use, as you would with a print publisher.

It is legal to make or store a single copy of material for your own purposes but not for publication. This means, for example, that it would not be a copyright violation to copy an article onto your computer, but it would be if you then attached the article in an E-mail and distributed it widely, unless you got permission to do so beforehand. The law does, however, allow for “fair use,” which involves quoting a small portion of a work without permission, though, of course, credit must be given to the author. If you are unsure what is or is not copyrighted, err on the side of caution or check with a lawyer or the copyright holder.

Copyright law also has implications for your writing if you send a document electronically or publish one on your own. Let’s say you have written a report on a two-year pilot project you managed. It includes original research and a statistical analysis of productivity that might be of use to similar businesses. You wrote the report to help your boss determine whether to continue the project, but you also want to share it with others in your field. You decide that the most efficient way to do that is to post parts of it on your company’s Web site. Understandably, though, you want to get credit for your work and your writing. Your best protection against unauthorized use would be to copyright your report and to note that it is copyrighted whenever you share it electronically.

You do this by placing a notice of copyright at the beginning, the end, or some other prominent place in your report. A notice of copyright contains the following three elements:

1. The symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word Copyright, or the abbreviation, Copr

2. The year of the first publication of the work

3. The name of the copyright owner

For example: © 1999 Johanna Doe.

You can also place a copyright notice on work that is not yet published by adding Unpublished work before the symbol [cpyrt].

Authored works, including writing and graphics, are automatically protected by copyright. But if there is a chance that your work will be distributed widely, you may want to take the legal step of registering it with the federal copyright office; then you will have a public record of your copyright claim should any question of authorship arise. Copies of the law, application forms, and other information are available, free of charge, from the U.S. Copyright Office. Their useful Web site is lcweb.loc.gov/copyright. Their mail address is Information and Publication Sections, Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20559.

A Word to the Wise

Though this section contains a lot of warnings, our intention is not to scare you into paranoia or silence. The rules and etiquette of electronic communication are still being ironed out, so the situation may seem more perilous or mystifying than it is. New technology, from the printing press to the telegraph, telephone, and television, has always created this kind of anxiety. Exhibit 10–2 lists recommendations that cover many of the situations you are likely to face at work.

Exercise 10-2 lets you apply these guidelines.

Exercise 10-2: Assessing the Risks

INSTRUCTIONS: Decide if each of the following situations involving electronic communication is a safe or risky practice. Our decisions are at the end of the chapter.

1. You’ve come across a funny column on the Web about the art of negotiation. To try to diffuse what is becoming a tense situation, you decide to send an e-mail to two people you’re in negotiations with, directing them to the site and suggesting that they read the column.

Safe ________ Risky______

2. In an e-mail to your former boss, you want to check out the validity of a rumor about a merger between his company with yours.

Safe ______ Risky______

3. Someone has e-mailed you a bunch of cartoons, a couple of which include images that seem out of place at your office. You like the others, though, and leave the whole message on your screen to show to a friend when she picks you up for lunch.

Safe ______ Risky______

4. You are working on a report on minority-owned businesses and have found a useful study by a sociology professor that quotes, in blunt language, people talking about racial bias. You download it and keep in on your computer to refer to later on.

Safe ______ Risky______

5. You’re logged onto a chat room under a pseudonym when someone rudely tells you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. To put that person in his or her place, you cite privileged information that you learned that morning at a meeting, though you know it won’t be made public until tomorrow.

Safe ______ Risky______

This chapter looked at issues that new communication technology raises. Writers should take advantage of the ease of writing by computer to plan, research, and write efficiently, while fighting the tendency toward wordiness and overly elaborate visual presentation. The goal of good visual design is the same as that of good: writing to have your message read and understood.

E-mail and the Internet come with their own conventions and potential dangers. E-mail is writing that functions as speech but lasts as long as other writing. This requires writers to compose their messages quickly and succinctly. When it comes to privacy online, writers and receivers of messages should acquaint themselves with their companies’ policies. They should treat e-mail as they would any business document but cannot assume that e-mail will be kept private. Finally, businesspeople using the Internet must abide by copyright laws, which apply equally online, and recognize that they are responsible for what appears on their computers.

For all the new technology, good writing is the same whether you do it by pen at your desk or on a computer in the palm of your hand while jetting across the ocean. It is focused on a purpose, it is written with the reader’s point of view in mind, and it seeks to convince through clear, well-developed arguments and evidence. A well-written message is organized logically, sticks to the point, and avoids irrelevant or unnecessary material. Throughout, the language is clear, concise, and appropriate, and all the mechanics—spelling, grammar, and format—are correct. By striving to meet all these criteria, you will sharpen not only your business writing skills but your thinking, too.

ANSWERS TO EXERCISES

Exercise 10-1

Examples:

1. I have to reschedule our July 8 meeting with our Web site designers to the following Monday, July 15. We will meet at 10 A.M. in the conference room, as planned. I look forward to seeing you then.

2. We are proud to sponsor the Walk Against Juvenile Diabetes again this year. Last year, we raised over $300,000 for the clinic, an impressive amount, especially for a first time out. We’re hoping to raise even more this year, and you can help. So join us for some fresh air, good exercise, good company, and a good cause. Registration forms are available at my office.

3. Please come meet Leah Sulavimbi, the newest addition to our team of engineers. Stop by our office tomorrow between 10 and 11 A.M. We’ll supply the coffee and pastries—and Leah. We hope to see you then.

4. Strike up the band! The rubber band, that is. As you know, we’re ready to launch our newest product, a rubber band that is guaranteed not to break. We’ve got a product to be proud of. Now all we need is a name to match, which, so far, has stumped us all. We need a name that’s descriptive and snappy (I apologize) and, of course, not already in use. This is a request to everyone in the company to help us out. I’m open to all ideas, so get your creative juices flowing and e-mail your brainstorms to me. Thanks very much.

5. I held my breath as I came to work this morning. Would this be the day? Would the report be on my desk? Alas, it was not to be. Ari, I appreciate your busy schedule, and I know you think your time is better spent doing other things than writing reports, but I’d like to convince you otherwise. As you know, I need your report in order to give people the credit they deserve, but, frankly, I need it so that you get the credit you deserve too. Being behind schedule makes us both look bad, and I have too much admiration for your work to let that happen. So humor me, okay? How does end of business tomorrow sound? I’ll look forward to seeing it then.

Exercise 10-2

1. safe

2. risky

3. risky

4. safe

5. risky