Her business is writing, speaking

So, like, a Spokane Valley woman is working to improve the, um, writing and speaking skills of businesses by teaching and sometimes reteaching them the basics of grammar and communication.

One important lesson is to avoid the use of words such as “like,” “so,” “um” and “yeah” in everyday speech, said Patty Harrison, who owns Grammar Pro.

Harrison travels to various businesses and offers classes that teach the fundamentals of communication, often to groups of about 15 people who depend on strong language skills for their jobs.

“There are a good number of people in our business world who value good grammar, who value good writing and who value the written word,” Harrison said.

Many times business professionals have forgotten the lessons they learned as young students, Harrison said. Her classes are a refresher from basic word-type recognition to sentence structure tips.

Harrison offers two grammar workshops, a writing workshop, a speaking class and a résumé class. She also works with individuals and will do proofreading for written work or résumés.

“We can always use help with our writings,” Harrison said. She attributes a great deal of the trouble in writing these days to the informal nature of e-mail, which is typically rife with spelling and grammatical errors.

“E-mail is probably the sloppiest, most unsophisticated writing I’ve seen in a long time,” she said. “I think it got off on the wrong foot.”

Harrison teaches that e-mails, particularly those to superiors, should always be cleanly written.

Many grammar mistakes come from bad habits, she said.

“Knowing that our brain works faster than our mouth, if we stop and think about what we’re saying for a minute, we will change our habits,” she said.