Business Writing

Overview

• Do you want to create a fantastic first impression with your written communications?
• Are you worried that your writing may come across as bureaucratic, too formal or difficult to understand?
• Do you want to be able to confidently create business emails or letters?

The correspondence we produce is an important part of our image, both as an individual and as an organisation. Our image will suffer if documents are carelessly written or do not support the impression we wish to create. This course will give you confidence in the accuracy and completeness of your written communications, and allow you to make the right impression.

This training may be available onsite; please contact us if you are interested.

Audience

This course will benefit anyone who has to write formal and informal business documents and correspondence.

Skills Gained

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• recognise and use the 4-block structure for a letter
• use powerful words and phrases
• demonstrate the importance of grammar, punctuation and spelling to business correspondence
• apply appropriate email etiquette
• understand the importance of using plain English
• demonstrate the differences between active and passive sentence construction
• remove cliches and redundant expressions from your correspondence
• prepare business letters using proven techniques
• Use Pyramid Thinking to organise complex or large volumes of data into a coherent story
• Prevent mistakes that stop you being understood.

Prerequisites

• Please bring examples of your business writing with you to this workshop (providing there are no confidentiality issues involved).
• We strongly advise all delegates to bring samples of their writing with them on a memory key. The added advantage is that writing created during the course can be taken away for further use.

Course Outline

• Personal objectives for the course.
• What should business correspondence look like and contain?
• Improving sample correspondence.
• Writing in plain language and the Plain English Campaign.
• The 4-block structure.
• Understanding grammar and practising spelling.
• Using Pyramid Thinking to create logical flow.
• Eliminating business cliches.
• Active and passive construction.