Business students at Miami (Ohio) University's Farmer School of Business work on rhetoric and are reminded to tailor their writing style to the purpose. They are told that conciseness and understanding one's audience are more important than ever.

"People have been complaining about the quality of student writing since Plato," said Kate Ronald, an English professor who runs the school's Howe Writing Initiative. "But I think businesses are paying more attention to it. Businesses today are doing so much more writing, and doing it so much more publicly — because so much of the discourse is discussed on the screen rather than on paper."

Some companies, Procter & Gamble notably among them, are working to correct bad writing habits with their own in-house writing courses.

But there still isn't much of a market overall for business writing classes, according to Peter Handal, CEO of Dale Carnegie Training.

"I think that would suggest that people are just so happy to get the communications going that they aren't spending the time on how to communicate," he said.