Planning and organizing your writing

The importance of structure. The need for planning both text and time. Structuring your writing at the detailed level. Different types of logical structure. ‘Need to know’ versus ‘nice to know’. Mind-mapping and the pyramid principle. Planning your time for wring and revising. The page or word budget. Getting started and keeping going. Tips for overcoming writers’ block. Increasing impact with headings, bullet points and lists. Effective illustrations.  Creativity tools for writers. Writing in a team.

Basics of effective writing

Rules for clear and lively writing. Sentence and paragraph length and structure for different types of document. Active versus passive. Word choice - avoiding wordiness and pomposity, worn out words, Readability statistics. Analysing your own writing.

Refining your style

Pitching your writing at different audiences. Techniques for making writing 'flow' better. Avoiding monotony by changing sentence length and structure, using lists, headings, quotes, etc. Transition words. Linking sentences and paragraphs. How to construct more elegant sentences using parallel structures. Ruthless writing for small spaces.

Report writing

Structuring the report. Company SOPs and style guides. Formal, impersonal writing style. What to put into each section. Executive summaries. Conclusions. Recommendations. Incorporating comments and agreeing a final version.

Proposal writing

Showing you understand the brief. Explaining your ideas. Making your solution credible, clear and concise. Selling the people and the company. Writing effective credentials and case studies. Summaries and conclusions.

Persuasive writing for marketing

Reconciling the company's and the readers' interests. Showing empathy. Mood and tone - challenging vs comforting. Seven rules for persuasive writing. Using language expressively.  Accentuating the positive. Stressing benefits, not features. The 12 most persuasive words in the English language? Showing how your ideas will work in practice. Using examples to make your point.

Writing for patients

Principles of  writing effectively for patients and the general public. Combining accuracy with readability. Avoiding jargon and unfamiliar language. Uses and limitations of readability scores. Lessons to be learned from research.

Newswriting

How to write a newsletter article or press release. The sequence of the news story. Writing effective headlines, subheads and callouts. Illustrating the news story. Language for newswriting. Taking notes during meetings for immediate conversion into news stories. Page sequence for newsletters.

Correct writing

Common mistakes of grammar and English and how to avoid them e.g. sentence fragments, run-on sentences, subject-verb mismatches, singulars and plurals, wrongly used auxiliary verbs, dangling participles and misplaced modifiers, wrongly used tenses, I and me, who and whom, position of ‘only’, parallelism. Grammar and usage quizzes.