Over the weekend I picked up the Wall Street Journal and read with interest a front page article that highlighted the SEC's frustration with securities offerings and other public filings chock-full of poor grammar, faulty punctuation and generally a myriad of poor writing skills.

Think about it. Public companies, IPO filings and other critical documents are full of grammatical junk. Frankly I wasn't surprised, because we have observed that the written communication skills of otherwise high-performance professionals, at all levels, are abominable.

Our educational system from grade school through high school is failing to produce the bare minimum education for writing skills. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, at least 20% of America's 12^th graders cannot even meet basic standards. Worse yet, 26% of college graduates produce writing that is deficient, and employers find that almost 30% of their professionals are deficient in all forms of written communication.