Business Writing Skills

Course Overview

Effective business writing is a linguistic, intercultural, functional and interpersonal skill. Successful business writing considers the reader and their needs, level, expectations and many other factors in order to achieve the required results. Impactful writing gives the right impression to the reader and is influential and purposeful; poorly thought-out writing, on the other hand, can damage the impression of the writer, be ignored and not achieve its purpose, or damage the relationship between those in the interaction.

This intensive and practical course will develop all the competences needs for planning and production of effective, impactful, engaging and influential writing. The course will grow the competences of attendees from the fundamental building blocks of effective writing such as paragraphing and managing cohesion, clarity, coherence and conciseness to production of whole documents and more. Together, we will cover language, tone, interpersonal communication in writing, structure, editing, proofreading and much more. Documents produced on the course will range from short, concise texts including various forms and purposes of e-mails to documents for meetings and also lengthy and highly structured information reports, research reports, technical specifications, feasibility studies, problem and ideas-focused proposals and others.

Course Objectives

• After the training course, you will learn to:
  • Manage all stages of the writing process and be able to apply the key principles of what makes writing effective.
  • Communicate effectively via e-mail for a range of functions while always being sure to avoid intentional or unintentional “flaming”.
  • Consider your reader in terms of technical content, formality levels, needs, directness and diplomacy, and more.
  • Produce a range of documents including e-mails, notes, messages, agenda and minutes, job descriptions, information reports, research reports, proposal, technical reports and process descriptions, specifications, and feasibility studies.
  • Edit your writing for strength, length and clarity and proofread your own work in order to ensure accuracy, credibility and consistency.

Target Audience

This course is suitable to a wide range of working professionals but will greatly benefit:

• Anyone who needs to regularly communicate via e-mail and cannot afford any miscommunication or damage to relationships when communicating by e-mail.
• Anyone who is required to write and present reports and proposals.
• Anyone who needs to produce documents for meetings.
• Anyone who needs to write and tailor technical content in their writing
• Anyone, in general, who needs to write regularly as part of their job and wishes to increase their confidence and competence in this area.

Training Methodology

Upon attending on this training course, the following methodology and approach will be used:

• Warmers, icebreakers and group dynamic tasks
• Trainer input and elicitation
• Brainstorming and controlled discussion tasks
• Worksheet-style tasks (gap fills, matching and so on)
• Models, examples, illustrations and anecdotes
• Various writing practice and production tasks
• Games and gamified tasks
• Trainer and peer feedback
• Reflection and personal action planning

Each day will begin with feedback on the previous day’s work based on the trainer’s review of participant files.