Writing With Confidence in Plain English

You learn to:

• Write clearly, effectively and quickly
• Use plain English to develop a concise, readable and pleasing writing style
• Apply the principles of plain English to any document - from email to report writing
• Project a positive image of yourself and your business
• Avoid common errors in grammar, spelling and word usage
• Develop your career
• Say what you mean

Many people are now finding that writing is becoming an increasing part of their daily workload. Yet school is often the last time they received any training in this skill. This two-day course focuses on building your confidence and ability to write in plain English, avoiding false elegance, and jargon.

We do this in just two days by focusing on:

• What readers look for in a document
• Six principles of clear writing
• How to organise information
• A simple process for ensuring that the needs of readers are met
• Applying the process to a number of documents

Reader-focused, clearly written documents support business decision making by being:

• Easy to read
• Easy to understand

Anyone who would like to develop their writing skills.

Course exercises give you activity-based experience of writing plainly, and can be customised to deal with issues specific to your business. Course exercises include:

• Analysing and prioritising the audiences for documents
• Revising a range of documents including letters, e-mails and reports
• Developing a reader-focused structure for conveying information in a document
• Signalling with sentences to get your message across to the reader
• Revising documents, using plain English job aids to focus the revision process
• Avoiding common pitfalls in writing

Delegates can receive instructor feedback on their writing during the course. Each delegate is invited to bring a piece of writing that they would like to have reviewed.

We support the process with a course book, which can be used to further refine the skills learned.

The course includes job aids and roadmaps to support your learning. Course exercise materials, job aids and roadmaps are provided on CD for use post-course.

Writing With Confidence in Plain English is a two-day course.

This course costs £800 per attendee. If you are interested in running the course onsite for your company we have attractive discounts for more than two attendees.