Why should this concern executives?  It's simple.  Your business communications are the face you show to the world -- customers and prospects, employees, potential hires.  If the writing on your website or in your e-mails is sloppy, misleading or just plain hard to digest, your sought-after image of quality and competence suffers.  You may talk "quality," but you show "mediocrity."  Eventually, the gap will show up on the bottom line in lost sales and diminished influence.

   Why is business writing suffering?  Let's not blame Miss Periwinkle, the proverbial seventh-grade English teacher.  She and public servants like her have been laboring for generations, but the world they tried to prepare us for has changed.

   For one thing, there is a greater expectation for speed.  Send an e-mail at 3:05 and by 3:10 you're looking for an answer.  Smart companies have learned how to speed up their replies, but responsiveness comes at a price.  Few e-mails are carefully thought out and drafted; fewer still are edited.  The trend toward "flatter" organizations has taken out a whole stratum of assistants and mid-level managers who used to double check communications with customers and employees.  As a result, quality has yielded to quick response.  That's a dangerous trade-off.

   What's more, despite the importance of writing well, few companies offer any writing training, even those that spend generous sums on technical and management training.  People are expected to know how to write well.  When they don't, little is done to upgrade skills, lowering the common denominator of quality even further.

   It doesn't have to be this way.  Writing is a trainable skill.  To learn more about how you can improve writing in your company, e-mail me at edward@edwardmillercoaching.com.  I'd love to discuss why good writing makes a difference and how I can help you accomplish that in your company.

   To use my favorite storytelling template:

   Once upon a time, I was perfectly content working with journalists, mostly reinforcing their leadership skills, occasionally coaching their career moves.

   Suddenly, I encountered some business writing my wife, Cindy, had been commissioned to edit.  I had heard over the years that the quality of business writing was declining, but a lack of daily exposure kept me isolated.  It was sad to see the evidence firsthand.

   Fortunately, I believed I could help.  Why not teach writing to non-journalists?  Why not help people build confidence in their emerging competence?

   Live happily ever after?  We'll see.  I don't intend to be Miss Periwinkle numbing seventh-graders with the intricacies of nonrestrictive clauses.  At times I'll deal with the grand strategies of preparing to write; at others, I'll deal with the gritty fundamentals, but always with one purpose: to share the joy of cooking thoughts into words.  I want people to feel the music of good writing so they can hum their own tunes.

   After a lifetime in journalism management, I am returning to my roots.  While preparing for a writing workshop at a local company I was perusing an old text: Ted Bernstein's Watch Your Language.  Turning to a page on storytelling, I realized I had in my hand the same volume I used in a workshop I led for newspaper interns in 1969.

   Unlike "Reflections on Leadership," my weekly essays on management e-mailed to more than 10,000 executives and front-line managers around the world, my as-yet-untitled blog on writing will wait here for readers to drop by.  They may arrive slowly, so I'll be patient.  After all, they have 130 million other blogs to read each week.  To those of you already here, welcome.  I hope you'll share my passion for the language by asking questions, forwarding suggestions and otherwise engaging with my mission to help those in the business world write with pride of craft, not fear of failure.