Business Writing for Busy Professionals

Hours: 24 / Access Length: 180 Days / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced
Retail Price: $450.00

Course Overview:

You will learn strategies to write documents faster and better. You will learn how to customize your documents for a specific reader and to accomplish your writing purpose. You will discover ways to create documents when time is limited. You will also master models to organize and format letters, emails, and reports in order to make them clear, direct, and reader friendly. Conversational writing style and parallel structure will also be covered.

One of the keys to success in any business is good communication skills and one of the most common ways to communicate in business is through writing. In the second half od the course, we look at the importance of grammar and tone to good writing and approaches to rewriting. We will also look at specific types of documents we might create.

Students will:

• identify the value of good writing.
• write explicit, clear and concise content that grabs the reader's attention.
• write content that captures the reader's attention with good rhythm and organization.
• create a document that represents the best applicaiton of the skills they have learned in this course.
• identify which tone to use for different messages and fix common grammar errors.
• identify the stages of the editing process.
• identify ways to improve common business documents.
• identify ways managers can improve worker's writing skills

About This Course:

We are committed to offering world class interactive online courses that provide training and learning support for the student in a number of ways during their experience. This course structure has been developed to provide activities to guide students throughout the entire process of learning. Learning activities include hands-on assignments that allow students to use what they are learning to allow better transferable skills within their work environments.

When a student learns, they are not alone.   Each student will be supported by our student services department – which ranges from course mentors, registrar, and technical support assistance.   Every month students have a progress report run on them every month by our student services department to ensure they are making satisfactory progress.   If a student falls behind, we reach out to them personally by phone call every month to see if there is anything we can do to continue to assist them with moving forward in their course.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: Understand the Demand for Good Writing

Good writing helps to show leadership skills and starts with good planning. We will look at ways we can benefit from good writing and how to get a writing project off to a good start.

• Poor writing has a high cost to businesses and to business people.
• Many times starting a writing project is the hardest part. We will look at ways to structure the writing process.

Lesson 2: Be Explicit Clear and Concise

When our writing is explicit, clear and concise our message gets through more clearly and we are able to get our reader's attention.

• By using precise details, avoiding jargon and using fewer sentences, we can avoid creating confusion with our writing.
• How we order our sentences and the words we choose can grab and keep our reader's attention.

Lesson 3: Rhythm and Organization

Writing with rhythm and making sure our message is well organized can help to capture and hold our reader's attention.

• By varying sentence structure and using transitions we can improve the way our writing flows.
• Documents can be ordered by time, space, importance, or meaningful categories.

Lesson 4: Putting it All Together

In this lesson we will create a document using the skills we've learned in this course.

Lesson 5: Tone and Grammar

In this lesson we will look at how tone and grammar help to make sure our writing is accepted and understood.

• The tone of your writing can influence the reader's actions and feelings.
• Poor grammar can overshadow any message that you may be trying to get across.

Lesson 6: Edit, Rewrite and Refine

In this lesson we look at the stages of the editing process.

• We will explore the three-stage editing process.

Lesson 7: Master the Documents You Use Most

In this lesson we take a look at the types of documents we write most often and tips for making them more effective.

• We think of emails as being informal, but it's still important to use good grammar and good formatting to ensure your message is received.
• Proposals and reports can give others an idea about us or our company and should be constructed to give the best possible impression.
• PowerPoint slides should not be a presentation by themselves but a reference for the audience to follow along with the main topics.

Lesson 8: Improving Worker's Writing Skills

In this lesson we will look at ways management can improve the writing skills for their workers.

• As has been mentioned several times in the book, poor writing costs businesses time and money. Ensuring employees have good writing skills can be a good investment.

All necessary materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.