Business writing skills

General duration

1 day

Target group

This program will highly focus on the preferred format and style of written documentation required by organisation. The facilitator will speak with your representatives to determine required formats, structures and any style guides established within the business The facilitator will also send a pre-course questionnaire to participants asking them to submit three pieces of writing they have recently prepared.

From this material, the facilitator:

assesses their writing ability
gains a thorough understanding of the written work they prepare, and
extracts examples for use as training material within the program.

This personalises the program and learning points become more relevant and specific to the participants. Participants use their own work as examples and training material.

Learning objectives

At the completion of this program, participants will be able to write documents which are clear, concise, complete and correct, and in the format required by the organisation.

Course content

Communicating in business

The difference between academic writing, creative writing and business writing
The Government Style Guide as a source of technique
Internal style guides

The composing process

The 4 step process to writing
- Gather material for the specific purpose of the document
  - Who is reading the document and why are they reading it?
- Use a spidergram to order information
- Draft
- Edit

Techniques to increase comprehensibility:

Sentence length and structure
Main message first
Passive/active voice
Conversation style
Use minimum words
Modern formatting techniques and visual presentation
Tone
- Word choice to suit the reader
- Personalise through pronouns
- Positive phraseology
- Responding to complaint letters
Using AI to help polish the document

Writing emails