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The Fix
The Passage
Here is a passage we found in the Chief Operating Officer’s newsletter published in the monthly magazine glossy of a Kingston area golf course:
While it is important to understand the quality of services that members receive, we also need to understand how are team members are doing. We recently asked our staff to participate in in an employee survey. I am glad to report that the results were positive - in the high 80th percentile. The staff provided us with a few key ideas on how we can achieve a better result next time. I would like to share a BIG thank you to the entire team for their input.
Feedback
We’ve bolded some words in the passage. Obviously, it should be “our” rather than “are” and there is no need for two “in”s in the next sentence. The COO’s newsletter is an important part of the club’s glossy and one could argue that it’s a proxy for the quality of the club. Such obvious errors reflect badly on the COO and the golf club. What’s more, both errors could have been prevented with something like Grammarly or the newsletter editor proofing the COO’s text carefully.
Let’s move on to the survey. The COO provides no indication of what employees were asked but he goes on to report that “the results were positive – in the high 80th percentile.” How is a reader to interpret this information? That employees are happy in their work? Probably but we’d be guessing. It seems to us that it would be better to indicate briefly the nature of what employees were asked and how they were asked. For instance, was the survey anonymous?
The next sentence is:
The staff provided us with a few key ideas on how we can achieve a better result next time.
What does this mean? What are the “key ideas” on “how we can achieve a better result next time?” Does the COO mean ideas related to the execution of the survey or ideas on how services to club members can be improved? Again, we don’t know.
Let’s move to the last sentence:
I would like to share a BIG thank you to the entire team for their input.
Generally, you don’t share a big thank you but rather offer it. This sentence could have been written:
I would like to thank the team for their input.
Finally, we’ll note a bugaboo of Hurley the Elder. In his experience, CEOs who use the term “team” to describe underlings tend to be dictatorial control freaks. They are afflicted with “I’m the smartest guy in the room” syndrome, a condition born of feelings of inferiority largely based in fact.
Odds and Ends
From McSweeney’s
Here’s a good paragraph from Jake Bettermann’s article “I’m the Person in Charge of Printing Out the Entire Internet” which appeared as a “Short Imagined Monologue” on the website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-the-person-in-charge-of-printing-out-the-entire-internet):
There’s not much oversight. It’s sort of a self-directed position. I’m starting with printing Wikipedia. That feels safe, right? Lots of knowledge going on there. At first, I would click random articles and just print out whatever it was. A few months in, I realized I’d accidentally printed out the article for BAREFOOT CONTESSA three times. Fair is fair, random doesn’t mean no repeats. After that, I started going alphabetically. There isn’t an alphabetical list of the articles, so I have to guess and double back a lot. I began at ACCUTANE but pretty quickly remembered ABRAHAM LINCOLN. As long as the printer keeps going I guess I’m doing all right. I hope I remember not to print BAREFOOT CONTESSA again when I get to B.
Here's another:
I guess I should start thinking about alphabetizing too. Right now everything is filed in the order I printed it. That’s not gonna help when the President of Whatever Is Left wants to learn about what kinds of birds there used to be. But that’s not even alphabetizing; that’s categorization. And then I guess I’ll need subcategories too. Is BIRDS enough to be its own thing? Does the movie The Birds go under BIRDS or MOVIES? Or both?
Here is the final paragraph:
Oh, APARTHEID just finished printing. Time to print APOLLO 13. That should be fun.
[Note: we were able to do some quick arithmetic on the nature of the problem this lad is tackling. It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are added to the internet each day. That’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A 60,000-word book is 360,000 bytes. Hence the information added to the internet each day is the equivalent of about 6.9 trillion books. Junior needs to pick up the pace!]