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Seminars and Workshops
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© 2008 Good with Words
Seminars and Workshops
More and more organizations, companies, and employees are realizing that clear writing is an important skill and one worth putting time and energy toward improving. We have developed a number of seminars and workshop topics designed to help people improve their business communications.
Our skill-building seminars and workshops vary in length – anywhere from 45-90 minute “Lunch & Learn”-type sessions to half and full-day seminars. Here are some of the more popular topics we present:
· Crafting Vertical Lists (bullets by any other name) – We’ve all tried to make sense of poorly drafted vertical lists. Though bullet lists are very popular, most of us never learned how to properly craft them. We look at the elements of vertical lists and rules to follow when writing them, as well as when it makes sense to use them and when it doesn’t.
· E-mail Best Practices – Believe it or not, there are best practices for using e-mail.
· Executive Summaries – Executive Summaries are not just for execs any more – they’re a useful summary for many types of business writing. We share our rules of thumb for creating useful summaries.
· Making Your Writing More Concise – In this session we show you simple techniques for trimming your writing by 10-20%.
· Managing the “Writing by Committee” Process – For better or worse, a fair bit of business writing is done by committee. We offer tips for managing the process and for improving the final product.
· Beyond PowerPoint – PowerPoint is a useful tool but there’s more to putting together a good presentation than just cutting and pasting text onto slides. We explore different types of presentations and consider how to make best use of PowerPoint for different presentations.
· Using Ordinary Words – This session helps you return from the land of business-speak, where people “advise” customers and clients of things, rather than tell them things, and where staff “elect” their benefits rather than “choose” them. During the session we talk about the virtues of ordinary words and the dangers of using jargon and “terms of art”.
Upcoming Seminars
Ingrid will be presenting a half-day seminar called:
Valuation Reports and Opinions: Your Stock in Trade
Are they as clear as they can be?
The seminar will be presented on September 3, 2008 in Quebec City in conjunction with the 2008 CICBV National Conference.
Topics covered in the seminar include:
- the perils of using jargon
- the do's and don'ts of using bullets
- pitfalls to avoid in charts and graphs
- recognizing passive language and avoiding it
- why breaking certain rules of grammar is ok
- the importance of telling a story ─ even in business writing
- how to craft an executive summary
For more information and to register for this seminar, click here.
If you are interested in having us customize a writing seminar for your company, professional organization, or association, please contact us.