Business Writing - 1 day course

You should attend if...

• you write documents and letters for the general public
• you are an administrative professional called upon to write a variety of documents
• you need to improve your writing skills

You will learn to...

• conduct an audience analysis
• choose an effective strategy for organising information
• write clear documents
• develop an energetic and clear writing style

The Workshop

This workshop teaches you how to design documents that help your audience make decisions and perform tasks correctly and efficiently. You will learn to identify weaknesses in your writing and to apply specific solutions to correct them. Our systematic approach is based on competency principles.

The Agenda

Refresh your writing skills:
The correct use of words and sentences. Learn how to chunk information and the correct way to punctuate.

An innovative approach to writing concentrates on the 10 most common writing errors.

Analysing the Audience:
Strategies for selecting and organising information begin with a careful audience analysis. Learn how to do this in a variety of situations.

Organising the information:
Learn techniques that will help you organise your information to meet audience needs.

Preparing Different Documents:
While most documents are designed to help people make decisions, they do have unique differences.

You must be conscious of these differences to give your documents maximum impact.

Learn how to design

• letters
• memos
• office reports
• proposals
• instructions

Learning the Art of Concise, Clear Writing:
During this interactive session, we will show you a series of tests and solutions based on the Editing for Readability technique. These tests help you to identify, and then fix, weaknesses in your writing by

• integrating ideas
• integrating details
• avoiding abstract and awkward phrases
• using active voice
• energising sentences

Evaluating Your Own Document:
You will evaluate one of your own documents during the Editing for Readability session. This way you learn–by doing–how to improve your writing. You can also use this approach to help others improve their writing.

With the course you get a substantial manual with full text for all topics–enabling the manual to be used later as a reference. The manual contains several valuable appendices containing words and phrases to avoid, commonly misspelt words, words commonly confused or misused, and much more.

Course topics are illustrated with real examples and interactive exercises.

The course is presented by Jill Nicholson