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Interested in developing your business writing skills? Or are you looking to make a strategic career advancement? Whatever your goal, our Business Writing course will give you the edge.
Today's professionals must be able to communicate effectively through the written word if they are going to succeed in the modern business environment. This course has been designed by industry professionals and teaches you the strategies needed to increase the clarity, impact and professionalism of emails, memos, letters, proposals, reports and résumés.
You will also learn how to eliminate wordiness and reduce writing and rewriting time. In addition, we teach you how to organise, begin and end documents effectively, as well as how to present ideas strategically and diplomatically.
Courses Direct's Business Writing course focuses on the range of business writing abilities needed to make a stronger impact at work and further develop your skills. Plus, as your course is delivered by correspondence, there are no timetables to adhere to so your study can fit around your current lifestyle.
Business Writing Style
Learning Objectives: to understand the essential principle of well-disciplined, jargon-free business writing. Subject Areas: Principles of style (clarity, directness, brevity); use of natural language; personalisation; word redundancy and tautology; avoiding long-wordage and over-wordage.
Business Writing Practice
Learning Objectives: to acquire basic skills in the disciplined practice of business writing. Subject Areas: Memo writing (briefing; information; communication; submissions); letter writing (with particular reference to effective openings and closings); report writing (structure, work choice, presentation); minutes of meetings.
Sentence Construction
Learning Objectives: to achieve competence in the range of techniques for sentence construction and to apply those techniques to achieve clarity and directness. Subject Areas: Simple and complex sentences; sentence length; subject-action writing; loose and periodic sentences; active and passive voice; achieving emphasis; parallelism; pronoun problems.
Building Paragraphs
Learning Objectives: to recognise how unity and cohesion can be achieved by well-constructed paragraphs. Subject Areas: Paragraph structure and length; topic sentence; topic development techniques; transition techniques (linking and signalling devices); diagrammatic and narrative format; paragraph interaction.
Punctuation
Learning Objectives: to improve punctuation skills to the point that punctuation is used creatively as a communication aid. Subject Areas: Punctuation cohesion; punctuation for emphasis; comparative roles of full stops and commas; the sentence dividers (colons and semi-colons); the parenthesis marks (brackets and dashes).
Planning, Drafting and Editing
Learning Objectives: to ensure that every piece of writing is prepared to achieve clear objectives; to develop editing and revision skills. Subject Areas: Preparing the target statement; the 12-step strategy definition process; chart outlining; list outlining; freewriting techniques; the editing process - self-checking, construction analysis, reverse dialogue.
Business Letter and Email Writing
Learning Objectives: to understand the correct techniques to apply to the range of letter and email-writing situations. Subject Areas: Letter construction; start-up technique; writing to persuade; writing to convince; writing to achieve action; answering the customer complaint; writing refusals and acceptances.
Handling and Presenting Statistics
Learning Objectives: to able to handle the range of techniques necessary for the presentation of statistical data in written form. Subject Areas: Tabulating and presenting averages; percentages and profiles; indices; combined techniques; visual presentation aids - graphs, bar charts, pie charts, scatter charts.
Report Writing
Learning Objectives: to present reports that are properly structured, easy to follow and which present clear and specific conclusions. Subject Areas: Report presentation; use of sections and section headings; structure options - prioritised, chronological, sequential, spatial; diagrammatic and narrative presentation; report writing style; word choice; tone of voice.
Memo Writing
Learning Objectives: to be skilled in presenting internal memos with brevity and clarity; whilst achieving co-operation. Subject Areas: Logistical memos; information memos; briefing memos; request memos; response memos; creative memos; objective checklists; writing style; atmosphere, presentation and structure.
Word Choice and Vocabulary
Learning Objectives: to be able to select (and spell) the correct word for the job. Subject Areas: Commonly misused words and phrases; the correct use of business and commercial terms; building a vocabulary to achieve brevity, crispness and precision memory techniques to improve spelling performance.
