Power of Language

Language does matter. People evaluate intelligence and professionalism based on a person’s language skills. Is it fair? No. Is it reality? Yes, it happens every single day. Successful people tend to be good communicators. If someone detects a grammatical or spelling error on your part, they may think of you as uneducated, unprofessional, or, at least, sloppy in your quality control.

For example, have you ever been in a presentation using Powerpoint © or some other visual material and observed a misspelled word or grammatical error on the slide? How did you react? At the very least, it was a distraction. Often, you speculate on the presenter’s skills or his/her professional standards for letting that slip by him/her.

Yet, there is a more important reason for the proper use of language and that is cultural success. To illustrate, think of the story of the Tower of Babel from the biblical Book of Genesis.

According to the narrative, mankind spoke a common language. They set to constructing a tower unto heaven. This probably was not an attempt to build a tower to climb into heaven but a temple for the worship of the heavenly bodies. Whatever the purpose, the project was a mammoth undertaking.

As the story goes, God was displeased with this plan. So, God mixed the languages of the people so they could no longer work together to complete the project. With the cooperation rooted in shared communication, there was no limit to what they could accomplish. With the chaos of diverse language, what they could create was limited.

There is a lesson to be learned from this story. When a culture shares a language, when the people can understand each other completely, they can work together to build great things. However, if they have “a failure to communicate,” their ability to collaborate, to build together, is greatly reduced.

If a culture wishes to build, to develop, it must have the capacity to communicate effectively. When the rules of spelling and grammar become anarchical or are ignored, when everyone speaks his/her own “tongue,” the ability to work together as a team diminishes. There is a chilling effect on development potential.

So, my students will have to forgive me if I include writing and language skills as part of course evaluation. Their potential for future success personally and the potential for culture achievement corporately depend in part on those communication skills.