Grammatical Versus Pragmatic Error

Abstract

Many communication instructors make allowances for grammatical error in nonnative English speakers’ writing, but do businesspeople do the same? We asked 169 businesspeople to comment on three versions of an email with different types of errors. We found that businesspeople do make allowances for errors made by nonnative English speakers, perceiving these errors as less bothersome than those made by native speakers. We also found that businesspeople perceive pragmatic errors of politeness and tone as even more bothersome than grammatical error—a finding we share with our students to persuade them of the importance of polite and professional email correspondence.

Instructor Evaluation of Business Student Writing: Does Language Play a Role?

“…Whereas prior longitudinal research found that lexical sophistication increased over time (Haswell, 2000), our findings revealed that it also predicts instructor scores. Finally, the error findings confirm prior studies that have documented negative reactions to errors in business writing (Beason, 2001;Boettger & Emory Moore, 2018;Martin-Lacroux & Lacroux, 2017;Wolfe et al, 2016).…”

“…Because research has examined both errors (Beason, 2001;Boettger & Emory Moore, 2018;Martin-Lacroux & Lacroux, 2017;Wolfe et al, 2016) and lexical sophistication (Gardner et al, 2019;Staples et al, 2018) in business writing previously, they were entered into the model in the same step. The regression model was significant, F(2, 76) = 11.43, p < .001, accounting for 22% of the total variance (adjusted R 2 ) in instructor scores.…”

Civility in Business and Professional Communication: Expected Norms and Unexpected Behavior

“…Our second article deals with the perceived importance of technical perfection in job-search correspondence-specifically résu-més. While some research reports that professional audiences will often overlook technical errors in workplace documents produced by multilingual writers (see, e.g., Wolfe, Shanmugaraj, & Sipe, 2016), job-search correspondence, specifically the résumé, is expected to be free of spelling mistakes-regardless of the source.…”

Comparison of College Faculty and Business Professionals as Evaluators of Student Business Letters

“…Closer to this study is one by Wolfe et al (2016) exploring what allowances instructors and professionals may make for nonnative English speakers (NNES) in business writing. Professionals were asked to respond to three different versions of the same email all with different numbers of grammatical and pragmatic errors (Wolfe et al, 2016, p. 400).…”

“…The studies discussed in Luijkx et al (2019) also emphasize this point through an investigate of the effects of errors by Dutch students when writing German business letters. Much like Wolfe et al (2016), Luijkx et al (2019) indicates that grammatical errors are assessed differently than pragmatic errors when a language barrier is anticipated (p. 42) That is, evaluators are more lenient when it comes to grammatical errors than those that are pragmatic (p. 44).…”