Beason Summary

In his article Ethos and Errors: How Business People React to Errors, Larry Beason reports the results of a survey he conducted to measure and interpret the reactions of business people to textual errors in business writing. The author hypothesizes that errors in business texts bother the readers not only because they impede the communication of meaning, but also because they harm the ethos of the authors. Therefore, in order to measure the gravity of errors as perceived by readers, not only textual errors, but also rhetorical aspects of constructing meaning need to be studied.

In the course of the study, Beason administered a questionnaire and interviewed fourteen business people engaged in reading and writing business documentations on a daily basis. The subjects were given twenty sentences to read and asked to rank their reactions to different types of textual errors found in the sentences on a scale from 1 (not bothersome) to 4 (extremely bothersome). The types of errors included misspellings, fragments, fused sentences, unnecessary quotation marks, and word-ending errors. The average rankings were as follows: Unnecessary quotation marks - 2.30, fused sentences - 2.48, word-ending errors - 2.59, misspellings - 2.70, and sentence fragments - 3.0.

The subjects also were interviewed to obtain a more in-depth account of their reactions to different types of errors. Their perceptions of the error gravity depended on textual and extra-textual variables. Textual variables included lexical complexity (errors in less complex words were more bothersome), syntactic complexity (errors in more sophisticated sentences were more bothersome), and position within a paragraph (fused sentences at the end of a paragraph was less bothersome). Extra-textual variables included perceptions of how the writers committing the errors would come across in the business community.

While the questionnaire helped measure the gravity of the errors as perceived by the subjects, the interviews showed how errors constructed the writer’s ethos for the subjects. Beason concludes that the more specific types of error confused the meaning, the more they harmed the writer’s ethos for business people reading the texts.