>> "But Mom, Who Is Going to Pay You to Know These Things?"

Dovie Wylie

Note: The following is from a handout prepared for the 1997 winter meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), held in Chicago. The author, Dovie Wylie, completed her M.A. in Linguistics/TESOL at San Jose State in 1979 and received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford in 1989.

Since 1979, I've been involved in training and consulting in situations dealing with the effective use of English - both written and spoken - in the workplace. My first contracts involved working with non-native speakers, but since 1982, I have also worked with native speakers, and now they make up the majority of my clients. Over the years, most client organizations have come from one of three areas: manufacturing, biotechnology, or software.

The title of my presentation is a question my then 10-year-old daughter asked me while I was still taking courses at Stanford. The question reflects reality: with academic positions so scarce, graduate students are well advised to think about how what they know about language might be useful in the world outside of academia. Answering that question involves knowing what's marketable, what's of potential interest to business and industry. I was doing consulting and training while I was in graduate school, so it was relatively easy for me to find connections between my course work and the workplace. If you don't have that kind of access, you can:

• Read - the business section of your local newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review - to find out about current workplace concerns.
• Attend a year's worth of monthly meetings of your local chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) to learn about training needs.
• Talk to everyone you know who's in business or industry, asking them what language- or communication-related issues they see at work.

You will also need to practice articulating what you know to businesspeople who have no background in linguistics. To give you an idea of what that might be like, here are some questions I've been asked to respond to, more or less as they were put to me. Please bear in mind that I have not attempted to answer all of these questions directly - sometimes because they aren't the questions the client should be worried about, or because I'm not the right sort of specialist to answer them. But in all cases, I've been expected to respond quickly and usefully. As you think about them, consider what you have learned in course work (such as discourse and genre analysis, pragmatics, phonetics, language acquistion, sociolinguistics) which might be helpful in coming up with an answer.

1. "We need you to help us determine whether an instructor at our technical training institute is making remarks which are sexist or racist while he is conducting training sessions. If he is, we want to know how likely he is to stop doing that."

2. "We have a 45-year-old woman in our group who speaks in a very high-pitched voice, sounding like a little girl. She's driving everyone crazy. Can she be helped?"

3. "The local community college came in and did some testing and told us that we have 50 machine operators who read at a fifth-grade level or below. How can we bring up their reading to an eighth-grade level?"

4. "The man who manages our buildings and grounds crew is very capable, and we'd like to promote him to a much more visible position in facilities management, but he doesn't speak very grammatical English. He's African American, 35 years old, from a small town in the South. Do you think he can learn to speak good English? We're embarrassed to have him representing our group, sounding the way he does now."

5. "We've been selling [this product] to professional electricians for years, but we'd like to market it through places like Sears so that any homeowner could buy it and install it. But we're worried that the instructions are too hard for the average person to read and follow accurately, and we don't want to get sued because someone gets hurt trying to install the product. Can you rewrite the instructions so that anyone could follow them, regardless of how well they read English?"

6. "Some of our customers are complaining that they're having problems communicating with people on our help desk. These staffers are from India, and they've only been in the U.S. a few months, but they certainly know our product well. We think it's their strong accent that's bothering our customers. How long would it take for them to lose their accents?"

7. "We have some software developers writing documentation in English which will be translated and read by people all around the world. There must be ways to write it so that it's faster and cheaper to translate, or for people to read in English if we're not going to have it translated. Can you train us to write like that?"

As I was nearing the end of writing my dissertation, I was offered a three-year, non-tenure-track appointment at a large U.S. university. It would have been a perfectly good way to launch an academic career. I had to decide what to do, knowing that it might be the only academic job I'd be offered. For a combination of reasons, I turned it down, and I've never been sorry. I find this work endlessly fascinating, with a constant challenge to use what I've learned about language to solve problems. People will pay you to know what you know about language-it's up to you to figure out how to get them to do that!

Maintained by Sally Morrison.