Moving from Gobbledygook to Clarity and Impact
How do you feel when you get a letter that starts:
Pursuant to your request, herein please find enclosed. . .
If the letters, memos, and reports in your organization sound anything like this, your readers are probably responding as you do: "This organization must be really stuffy!"
Clients and customers who receive letters filled with bureaucratic phrases get annoyed because the impersonal tone makes them feel unrecognized as real people with personal concerns and feelings. When business writing is anonymous, distant, and formal, your organization becomes anonymous, distant, and formal.
This kind of writing may also hurt internal operations. Good employees and their good ideas can go unrecognized simply because their thoughts get lost in confusing and wordy language.
To help you strengthen your organization's written communications, CEI has designed an Effective Writing Seminar: Moving from Gobbledygook to Clarity and Impact, a one-half-day or full-day Business Writing Seminar that gives employees the tools and skills they need to write clearer, less wordy, and more effectively. They will learn to organize their writing projects to make it go quicker, more smoothly, and with less stress. Participants in the half-day seminar will discover through actual examples and hands-on practice how to:
- Identify the purpose of their writing.
- Determine what information readers really need.
- Organize information so readers of all types get it at their own pace.
- Eliminate wordiness, clichés, and bureaucratic phrases.
- Cut repetition.
- Warm up and personalize their writing tone.
- Recognize and fix the most common grammatical errors.
In the full-day program, they go into greater depth on these topics and focus on:
- Overcoming writer's block.
- Understanding both obvious and hidden audiences.
- Using editorial marks.
- Organizing documents.
- Responding to angry communications.
- Using e-mail effectively.
Not only will participants learn the specific tips and skills they need to make their writing clearer and more organized, but they will have their own work analyzed and edited. This may include an analysis of letter templates for companies that use standard formats. Employees will learn the predictable ways in which writing can be ineffective and how to ensure that these mistakes don't appear in their own writing.
In the half-day program, samples of your organization's writing are examined and edited in group discussions. In the full-day program, participants have the option of submitting anonymous writing samples for analysis. In either program, all participants get hands-on experience in editing their own material.
All participants receive complete workbooks they can use as references, including the Rogues' Gallery of Wordy Words, the Checklist of Editorial and Proofreading Marks, and the Quick Grammar Review. This seminar, in either half-day or full-day sessions, is limited to a maximum of 15 participants to ensure personalized attention.
The fee for CEI's Effective Writing Seminar: Moving from Gobbledygook to Clarity and Impact is $2,950 for a half day and $3,950 for a full day for up to 15 participants. Additional participants beyond 15 are $75 each for the half-day seminar and $100 each for the full-day seminar.
For more information on this seminar, please call the Institute at (800) 410-4CEI (4234) or e-mail us at cei@talk2cei.com. |
