DeWese--All the Write Stuff. . .

I am astounded by the poor writing skills of many of the folks who write to me via the U.S. mail, as well as those readers who send me e-mail. I recently wrote a hurried, three page counter-proposal and faxed it to the CEO of a large printing industry consolidator about one of my M&A deals. He called me in a few minutes to tell me that he was amazed that I had written a "perfect" document in less than an hour. In his office, he said, it would have taken all day, would have required several rewrites and still would have contained errors.