Effective workplace writing

This course teaches advanced workplace writing to those who need this professional skill. Whether you are writing a college dissertation, a business plan or a procedures manual, the effectiveness of your work will depend on three factors: (i) the quality of your content, (ii) how you have organized it and (iii) how you present it to your audience.

Course content

This course delves into the planning, organizing and structuring of workplace documents and shows how the inbuilt strengths of the Office programs can unlock your creativity and enhance your productivity. Taking an audience-centric approach, we show you how to organize your thoughts and structure your message for greatest impact. Whether you are working alone or as part of a workgroup, this course will take you through the processes of pre writing, composition, review, editing and final assembly.

The course also discusses the different types of documents and forms of publication including web-based and documents designed for reading on hand-held devices. The final module in this course discusses common writing errors, spelling and spelling variants, grammar and punctuation.

Who will benefit from this course

This course is intended for people who already know the basics but who want to improve their written communication skills and unlock the full power of their software applications to deliver professional documents for the workplace – business or academe. It will be invaluable to:

i.    Young professionals who want to develop or improve their writing skills
ii.    Business people who need to write powerful business documents for their organization or presentation to clients
iii.    Students who need to acquire writing skills for college or university

Learning result

At the end of this course participants will be able to:

•    Know and apply the fundamentals of workplace writing
•    Develop and implement a communications strategy for their documents
•    Design and structure a writing project for maximum impact
•    Know and apply the processes of invention, composition, revision and editing
•    Understand the basis of copyright, plagiarism, public domain and the creative commons
•    Understand the difference between templates, themes and styles as they affect layout, language and tone of a document and how to apply them
•    Apply page and document set-up features to lay out a document
•    Integrate support material such as text boxes, tables, figures, charts and illustrations
•    Document sources, apply bibliographies and reference lists as well as footnotes and endnotes
•    Understand the process of review and proofreading prior to final assembly
•    Prepare different types of documents
•    Recognize spelling and punctuation variants between Australian, British and US English
•    Understand common writing, sentence and punctuation errors.