To learn more about our Business Writing Programs, all of which can be tailored to your organization's specific needs, please select a section below:
What Makes Us Different?
As we design a program tailored to your organization's needs, we keep in mind that you cannot spare valuable personnel for extended periods. From two-hour to three-day seminars, flexible yet thorough and focused instruction and follow-up coaching are our answers.
For our Business Writing Programs, it all begins with what has long set us apart: our Four-part Pre-seminar Assessment Process.
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Step 1. Participants complete a brief questionnaire that helps them (and us) assess their processes and level of confidence.
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Step 2. We prepare a writer's personalized profile of strengths and areas of concentration based on the writing samples submitted.
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Step 3. We offer written comments on specific features of the samples, such as clarity, conciseness, structure, grammar, attention to readers' needs.
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Step 4. We provide customized written and audio feedback that clarifies and expands the written comments and offers added strategies to try.
This confidential feedback is distributed a few weeks prior to each seminar so participants can review and benefit, before attending. Additionally, these reviews allow us to tailor the seminar to particular group needs.
But that's not all. To ensure learning has occurred, participants can submit post-seminar samples two to four months later — or whenever they have a work in progress they'd like critiqued. These reviews offer participants timely advice as well as direction for continued improvement.
Why this workshop is for you
Do your business memos and reports get the results you want? Do your emails get read? Do you panic when it's time to write? If so, you're not alone. Many people who write on the job feel unsure about their skills and wish there were simple guidelines for getting started and expressing themselves in winning ways.
The goal of this workshop
This practical, confidence-boosting, and skill enhancing workshop offers exactly these guidelines. Using real-time reports, memos, and email, the workshop covers aspects of business writing, from conquering writer's block, to achieving the right tone for your audience, to finessing the finer points of structure, grammar, and style.
Topics include how to
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Get started quickly
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Organize your thoughts and create that all-important opening
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Choose a layout that enhances readability
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Write appropriately to all levels within the company and to external customers
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Know when to email and when not to
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Spot the words and phrases that clutter most business writing
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Cut out clichés, redundant words, stuffy language, and sex/race/age/religion bias
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Choose one word over another for more power or style
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Master the rules of grammar and punctuation
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Maintain a clear, objective tone
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Write with confidence, clarity, and power.
Call (941) 387-8735 or email us now to get started!
Business Writing Workshop: Managing Your Team's Writing
Why this workshop is for you
Good writing is good business. A well-written memo or email makes a positive impression on your customers and associates. And it says much about the writer, the team, and the company. Through conversations with other leaders, we have found them eager to boost the quality of writing produced by their teams. And while many managers may feel confident about their own writing skills, they may feel less comfortable about how to encourage and coach clear, persuasive writing in others. "Managing Your Team's Writing" is a program that will train team leaders to productively and constructively demand and get quality writing from their teams.
The goal of this workshop
This program is not designed to teach managers how to be writing instructors. And while the material presented will increase their own effectiveness as writers, the program's real aim is to help them help those they manage to write better: more quickly, clearly, confidently to their audiences, be those audiences customers, colleagues, or CEOs. It does so by training leaders to
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Distinguish between effective and ineffective writing
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Communicate consistently and productively the importance of high-quality correspondence
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Establish a system that produces persuasive writing within their team or department
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Use specific techniques to help their team overcome resistance to writing and to generate it in a timely and relatively painless way
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Give appropriate oral and written feedback that both helps their team correct deficiencies and encourages them to keep improving
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Recommend techniques, opportunities, and resources to assist those on their team who need to write better.
Why this workshop is for you
Through this workshop, support staff will have an opportunity to become greater assets to their managers and their organizations. By learning strategies that will make them more effective writers, efficient revisers, and accurate proofreaders, they can become more valued members of their office team.
The goal of this workshop
Specifically, the workshop will help participants to
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Edit and revise efficiently their own writing and the writing of others
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Generate standard letters, memos and reports that are appropriate for their readers, their purposes, and that are consistent with their managers' preferred styles
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Replace jargon and clichés with fresher, clearer, more original language
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Organize writing for impact as well as for clarity
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Proofread to catch errors typical of most business prose today.
Call (941) 387-8735 or email us now to get started!