Error Analysis in Business Correspondence Produced by Secretarial Studies Graduates in Anambra State

Business correspondence is a core professional competence for secretarial and office administration graduates, and the quality of their written English directly affects organizational communication effectiveness and graduate employability. This study analyses errors in business correspondence produced by secretarial studies graduates employed in private sector organizations in Anambra State, examining the nature, frequency, and professional consequences of identified errors. A corpus of two hundred business letters, memoranda, and emails collected from forty graduates working in ten private sector organizations in Onitsha and Awka was subjected to comprehensive error analysis using a scheme distinguishing grammatical, lexical, discourse-level, and genre convention errors. Employer assessment of the same documents was collected independently to evaluate the professional impact of identified error types. Grammatical errors, particularly tense sequence problems, subject-verb agreement violations, and incorrect preposition use, constitute the largest error category at thirty-eight percent of all identified errors. Discourse-level errors involving poor paragraph coherence and unclear logical connectives are the second most frequent category and are rated by employers as the most professionally damaging. Genre convention errors including inappropriate salutation formulas, incorrect closing conventions, and missing structural components appear in over fifty percent of formal business letters. The study recommends that secretarial studies programmes in Anambra State polytechnics introduce a dedicated business correspondence genre training module with employer-assessed simulated task components. Keywords: error analysis, business correspondence, secretarial graduates, Anambra State, professional writing.