Duration: 1/2 day or 1 day
Group size: up to 16
What the course covers
- Think of the reader: how much time do they have to read your report/letter/email? If the communication is unclear, it’s pointless. If it’s too long, it won’t get read – again, pointless.
- Go through some common mistakes and follow each with an exercise.
- Apostrophes
- Commas, colons and semi-colons (example of the nurse who lost her job because of a misplaced comma)
- Common spelling mistakes (and American spelling)
- Common spelling mistakes (and American spelling)
- Elegant variations – starting sentences with a different word.
- Over-use of capitals, flowery adjectives, turning nouns into verbs, clichés, and jargon.
- Avoid pomposity i.e. use “go” rather than “proceed”.
- Stick to active sentences rather than passive i.e. put the doer first.
- Use first person singular or plural rather than third. However I would refer to it as use I/we/you rather than they/them.
- Keeping things simple.
- Sentence and paragraph length.
- Flesch reading-ease index.
- Importance of checking through not just for grammar and spelling but that you’ve got people’s names correct and with the correct spelling.
- Consistency.
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