Writing English For A Global Audience

You will learn how to:

• Write documents that will be clearly understood by non-native readers of English
• Engineer your use of language to provide simple and readable documents for a global audience
• Limit choice in word selection and grammar without losing meaning
• Remove ambiguity and inconsistency from your documents
• Enable swifter and easier translation of your documents
• Improve understanding of your documents by:
• Summarising information in a way helpful to your readers
• Signalling to your reader with clear document design

Native writers of English write with the unspoken assumption that everyone who has some knowledge of the English language has the same knowledge as the writer. This is untrue. English as a written language is often ambiguous and difficult to understand accurately by non-native speakers.

Whether you are writing instructions to be read by many nationalities, trying to sell your products on the global stage or outsourcing some of your production a you need to understand the communication issues facing you. This course:

• Describes the language issues facing businesses who want to trade globally
• Outlines a strategy that will allow your business to communicate more successfully with non-native speakers and reader of English.
• Teaches how to quickly create more effective documents for a global audience possessing a limited knowledge of English

Anyone involved in drafting business or technical documents that must be understood by readers with a restricted understanding of English.

The course exercises focus on issues specific to writing for non-native speakers and readers of English. We can customise the course exercises so that they deal with problems you have identified in your business. Standard course exercises include:

• Developing a vocabulary of approved words
• Rewriting passive sentences into active voice
• Signalling with sentences and paragraphs to get a message across to the reader
• Making a document more concrete by removing and replacing abstract terms
• Analysing an example document at sentence, paragraph and document structure levels and refocusing it for a global audience
• Revising a document using controlled language job aids to focus the revision process
• Developing a reader-focused structure for conveying information

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.

Included with the course are job aids and roadmaps to focus each stage of the process, and a CD containing course exercise materials, job aids and roadmaps for use in the workplace.

Writing English For A Global Audience 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.