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

• • 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

• • 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

• • 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

• • 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

• • Punctuation purpose
  • Semi colon, colon, dash, comma
  • Spelling
  • American or English spelling?

6. Planning what you write

• • 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