Courses

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
  • 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
• Word choice to suit the reader
• Personalise through pronouns
• Positive phraseology

Writing emails 

• Email etiquette and policy
• Structure
• Tone

Letter writing

• Format of a formal business letter
• Contemporary layout
• Personalisation
• Tone
• Formality vs informality
• Writing styles
• Responding to complaint letters

Reports
 
Format of short reports and longer reports
 
The standard headings for proposals