Having recently been (somewhat justifiably) skewered by the law students taking my ADR Employment Class for bluntly telling them that they couldn't write, I must admit that the following reprint, called to my attention by Digg, helped soothe the wounds of student evaluations. 

But before reprinting an excerpt from the Times article:  What Corporate America Can't Build, a Sentence, I have to tell you what I told my Business Law students when I was teaching undergrads in the mid-'80's.  If you can't write a coherent essay, how could I possibly grade your understanding of the subject?  In fact, you come to understand the subject in the process of writing about it coherently.  They didn't like it either.

My justification.  The New York Times.  

What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence
By SAM DILLON

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student.

"i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you".

Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it.

"E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies tearing their hair out."

A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.

The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said.

"It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard."

 

For remainder of article, click here.

What Does This Have to Do with Dispute Resolution?

To resolve a dispute, you must understand it on as many levels as possible.  The parties' positions -- their demands and the principled reasons for them; the parties interests and needs -- the reasons why they're making the demands; the parties' emotional "hot points" -- their felt-response to the way in which the dispute has so far been handled (usually in an adversarial manner); and, the ways in which the parties can de-couple the problem from the process; the personality from the potential solution; and, the way in which the strength of the parties' conflicting versions of the same story contribute to impasse.

Unless you're Einstein, you can't do this work in your head.  You need to be able to make sense of it and one of the most effective ways to do so is to put pen to paper or hands to keyboard and write it out.  

Writing is just thinking out loud in a structured, linear, rational fashion.  If we can do that, solving the disputes that darken our days becomes the easy part.

Really. 

And once you know and follow the rules, you can do something dazzlingly violative like this:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

e.e. cummings