Concern exists among both academics and employers regarding the quality of graduates' writing. The complaint, as it is most commonly phrased, is that young graduates can no longer "string a simple sentence together". If true, this is a problem: the quality of students' writing seriously affects their chances in the job market. In this small-scale study, the authors investigated employers' complaints about graduates' writing and attempted to identify the typical writing problems graduates encounter. Answers were sought by reviewing the literature on graduates' writing skills and by surveying members of the Association of Graduate Recruiters regarding their estimation of new graduate employees' writing skills. Important conclusions are that concern among employers regarding graduates' writing skills is serious and that complaints are often about basic skills such as grammar and punctuation. However, employers do not seem to see much difference between the writing skills of business graduates and other graduates and are uncertain as to whether universities pay sufficient attention to writing. (Contains 2 notes and 8 figures.)