Writing for Business
Whatever you are writing, you will learn a proven method that will make your documents clearer, more concise, effectively structured and far more professional.
Writing for Business is designed for anybody who needs to write as part of their professional life.
What will you learn?
Writing is an important part of most professional lives. Being able to communicate a message clearly and concisely is an incredibly important skill – whether that’s when writing reports, emails, marketing documents or pre-sales materials. Poor writing, meanwhile, can lead to frustration, miscommunication, and a loss of reputation and sales.
This course is based on the tried-and-tested specialist techniques used by our agency to provide writing services to companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, BAE Systems, BT gGlobal Services, Carter Jonas, Experian, HP, Kapsch CarrierCom, QinetiQ, Siemens, SITA and TomTom.
The outcomes of the training include a significant improvement to both the professionalism of your documents and how efficiently you produce them.
On completion of this course, you will be able to:
Implement an effective writing process
to make your writing more efficient, leading to better qualityClarify objectives and messages
before writing, leading to clearer and more focussed writingPlan and structure documents effectively
to create a logical flow and, again, to speed up the writing processUse clear and concise language
to get your point acrossImprove the quality of your writing style
to make your documents grammatically correct, appear more professional, more authoritative and easier to skim-readProofread your writing
to ensure your documents are free of mistakes
Your training options
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eLearning available through this site
The eLearning is available to buy through this site.
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On-site, face-to-face training + eLearning
Many companies recognise how valuable it can be to have one of our trainers spend time with their team. This model features a one- or two-day classroom engagement designed to introduce the Structured Writing Method to teams. The day is typically located at your company premises and is focused on the specific needs of individual cohorts.
A classroom training day is augmented with the eLearning, to create a blended learning solution.
This has two important benefits.
It enables the classroom day to be more focused
During the classroom session we can focus on exploring the specific needs of the cohort on the day.Blended learning is ideal for writing training
A blended learning approach is ideal for learning a soft skill such as writing.
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Remote learning sessions + eLearning
Our blended virtual training model is an excellent alternative to face-to-face blended writing training and the perfect solution for those needing to train geographically dispersed teams including those working from home.
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Remote mentoring and editorial consultancy
For a small number of clients we are available to provide ongoing one-to-one editorial support from Paul Ayling, founder of Writing Machine and creator of the Structured Writing Method. This is appropriate for both individuals and members of marketing or bid teams. Provided on a time and materials basis, this engagement can include training, writing, messaging, strategy, critical feedback and quality control.
If this sounds of interest, please contact us to find out more.
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Scorm-compliant eLearning modules for corporates and institutions
For those wishing to train large numbers of learners, we can make the eLearning materials available as a site licence.
Please contact us to find out more.
Writing for Business eLearning lessons
Writing for Business eLearning is available as an enterprise site licence for organisations wishing to upskill large numbers of people across the organisation. It is also available as part of a blended training delivery with classroom or virtual classroom courses.
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The first element of Writing for Business is objective setting. What are you trying to communicate? Who are you writing for? What do you want them to do when they have finished reading? This lesson includes exercises to get you thinking clearly about what communications objectives are and how to create them.
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This session reminds you that putting words on the page should be the very last thing you do. Long before this, you should think about who you’re writing for and what message you want to communicate to them. This lesson gives you a task to communicate a particular message to a number of individuals, and encourages you to think about your audience, your objectives and to combine these thoughts to create messages. Marketing and pre-sales messages, for example, are characterised as being necessarily competitive.
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This lesson teaches the theory and benefits of structured writing techniques, especially when working with objectives and messages. It includes teaching Microsoft Word’s Outline View facility – a tool which has the power to transform the way you approach writing a document. For report writers, it also greatly improves productivity at the research stage.
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This lesson teaches you how to write in a way that ensures your readers pick up on your key messages, even if they only skim-read your document. It looks at how to communicate a message using non-cryptic headings and the use of writing devices such as bullets, boxes and bold text.
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How are you going to hold your reader’s interest if your text is uninspiring and dull? To address this issue, this lesson covers techniques such as turning facts into benefits, using more verbs and fewer nouns and using active rather than passive sentence constructions.
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This lesson teaches you how to use shorter and more simple sentences, how to use jargon phrases appropriately and the critical use of Microsoft Word’s ‘Readability Statistics’ functionality to help improve clarity.
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Writing with authority is important for internal documents; even emails. It is particularly important for external-facing documents, especially those offering consultative advice.
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This lesson explores the importance of grammar and punctuation and looks at several key areas of difficulty and confusion including: commas; colons and semicolons; hyphens, en dashes and em dashes; apostrophes; acronyms; ‘affect’ or ‘effect’?; ‘s’ or ‘c’?; and how and when to break the rules of grammar.
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One of the key challenges when proofreading is the sheer number of potential errors that must be identified. It makes sense, therefore, to break the job into a series of consecutive steps, each designed to focus on a different aspect. This lesson teaches a five-step process for proofreading to ensure that writing is free of mistakes.
Writing for Business teaches you our unique Structured Writing Method. This approach to thinking and writing provides a logical, linear process that we follow as an agency and teach as an academy. It is applicable to every business and to every business document.