Writing for Professionals is designed for anybody who recognises that writing in English is a part of their professional life. It teaches a proven method that will make your documents clearer, more concise, effectively structured and far more professional.
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 teaches Writing Machine’s unique Structured Writing Method, 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 Global Services, Carter Jonas, Experian, HP, Kapsch CarrierCom, QinetiQ, Siemens, SITA and TomTom.
What will you learn?
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
making writing more efficient, and leading to better quality documents - Clarify objectives and messages before writing
leading to clearer and more focused writing - Effectively plan and structure documents
to create a logical flow and, again, to speed up the writing process - Use clear and concise language
to get your points across - Improve the quality of writing style
to make documents grammatically correct, appear more professional, authoritative and easier to skim-read - Proofread your writing
to ensure they are free of mistakes
Structured Writing Method eLearning lessons
The Structured Writing Method eLearning is either available as eLearning only, or as part of a blended delivery with classroom or virtual classroom courses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s your choice:
Virtual blended classroom, open courses and more.
The course is available in many delivery formats to suit your needs or those of your team.
Blended Virtual Classroom
Blended Virtual Classroom
Combine the geographical reach of eLearning with the benefits of virtual classroom sessions focusing on the specific writing needs of your team.
Open courses
Open courses
Writing Machine’s unique writing training courses are available as open courses.
Other options
Blended Classroom
There are many other ways to benefit from Structured Writing Method training including: classroom only, individual eLearning licences, eLearning-only (hosted) and eLearning (site licence).
Training you can trust
The Structured Writing Method was first created and refined over 30 years ago in order to train in-house writers. Since then, we have written for, and delivered writing training courses, to clients in the UK and around the world, in sectors ranging from technology, engineering and aerospace, to retail, health & safety, education, event management, food services, leisure and professional services.
‘The course made me aware of how easy it is to make mistakes.’
‘I will use the structuring every day.’
‘The Writing for bids course was spot on. People left the training with real skills and techniques that they could implement immediately, on a day-to-day basis. I’m very confident that our writers now have the foundation they need to produce clearer, punchier documents.’
‘Writing Machine’s Structured Writing Method has not only improved the way we write our reports, it has also changed the way we think as a business.’
‘I’m sure that the course will help me produce better quality, more engaging documents and challenge the status quo around content headings.’
‘The team has absorbed many valuable skills and techniques for creating and communicating clear and concise messages in their writing with greater confi dence. The interactive eLearning format is great. It lets each participant proceed at their own pace and the ability to re-visit course modules over weeks and months is a useful tool for reinforcing and refreshing the learning experience.’
“The training provided some great insights for the team who were inspired to put the learning straight into action.”
‘My writing will totally change.’
‘I have a clearer idea how to adapt sentences to ensure the messaging is clear.’
‘[The Structured Writing Method] will help me improve the way I structure my documents, which will also improve my efficiency and the time spent working on them.’
‘I thought I was OK at writing, I know now that I can improve a lot!’
‘I feel much more confident when starting to write now – I won’t dread it like I used to!’
‘It will make me question everything I write… Is it necessary? Is it clear?’
‘I feel more confi dent with my writing and starting with a blank page.’
‘I will think more about structure and headings to bring out key messages and themes.’
‘[I would recommend this course for]… new joiners.’
‘[I would recommend this course for …] ‘… anyone who writes.’
‘I think the course will help my communications to be clearer and more succinct.’
‘This course will improve my writing greatly and give me confidence in the future.’
For more information, including a detailed course structure, please download our brochure
