All writing should be clearly understood by the reader
If you’re dashing off a quick email to your workmates or preparing a complex business report, your writing must clear, concise, and correctly spelt and structured. During this course you will learn the fundamentals of correct and efficient writing.
- For those who wish to brush up on their writing skills, or acquire the basic skills that they should have but did not develop properly while at school.
- Build confidence and ability to write better at work, at home, anywhere
- Learn to write clearly and efficiently
- Learn to communicate thoughts in the minimum number of words, and without any ambiguity.
Course Aims:
- Define the nature and scope of writing.
- Discuss the way written sentences and paragraphs are properly structured.
- Develop an increased capacity to write clearly.
- Develop improved conciseness in writing.
- Develop and improve punctuation skills.
- Apply basic writing skills more efficiently in a range of situations.
There are 6 Lessons in this course:
1. Introduction
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- Scope of writing -where is writing used?
- What is effective writing
- Good writing is direct
- Good writing is objective
- Variety is good in writing
- Understanding human communication
- The communication process
- Types of communication (verbal, non verbal, etc)
- Communication channels
- Communicating efficiently
- Writing for a purpose
- Understand your reader
- Content
2. Basic Writing Skills
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- Parts of speech
- Types of nouns -proper, common, collective
- Plurals
- Possessive nouns and pronouns
- Types of verbs: regular, irregular etc.
- Adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions
- Common grammatical errors: comma splices, fragmented sentences, dangling modifiers, etc
- Sentence construction
- Types of sentence: declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, etc
- Sentence structure
- Constructing sentences
- Combining sentences
- Expanding basic sentences
- Adding modifying words, phrases or clauses.
- Linking words or phrases
3. Clear Wording
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- Introduction
- Common causes of confusion: homophones, malapropisms, etc
- Ambiguity
- Making meanings clear: Illustrative context, glossing, etc
- Informative language
- Persuasive language
- Imaginative language
- Other types of language: colloquial, formal, informal, etc
- Simplicity
- Building a paragraph
- General guidelines for effective writing
4. Concise Wording
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- Conciseness
- Circumlocution
- Condensing your writing
- Common problems contributing to lack of conciseness
- Active and passive voice
- Condensing text: how to Precise
5. Punctuation and Accuracy
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- Punctuation purpose
- Semi colon, colon, dash, comma
- Spelling
- American or English spelling?
6. Planning what you write
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- Business formats
- Business letters
- Planning what you write
- Writing a media release
- Writing an answer or an essay
- Academic writing, verbs, quotations
- Unpack the question
- Research
- Referencing