Enquire about an open course. Virtual Classroom on 6 Nov 2024. Cost £395Enquire about a private course
Business Writing Training – Brush Up Your English Course Outline
In this world of text and emails does anyone really care if we make the odd grammatical mistake or write rambling sentences with little or no punctuation?
Well, actually yes. Lots of people do! Bad grammar and punctuation make even the simplest business writing harder to read. Grammatical mistakes can cause your colleagues, boss and clients to perceive you as less bright than you actually are!
Training in correct grammar and punctuation is essential for business writing if clients or any stakeholders might read your documents – mistakes reflect badly on the entire company, with the public very quick to mock you on social media.
It doesn't matter whether you are writing an email, a letter or a report – good business grammar is going to help you reach your audience and get the result you want – without annoying them with simple mistakes. On this business grammar course, you will learn how to overcome some of the most common grammar challenges and how to communicate in an effective and professional way.
See our free apostrophe catastrophe presentation on getting those pesky apostrophes right!
What you will learn on this brush up your English course
By the end of this business writing course, you will know how to:
- Recognise and avoid the common grammatical mistakes that everybody makes
- Choose the right kind of words for your reader and make your writing sharp and concise
- Avoid doubt and uncertainty when writing more complex sentences
- Use punctuation properly – and learn why it's necessary to do so
- Recognise and avoid commonly-confused words or miss-spelt words
- Use Word™ features to check your document
- Write good business correspondence that conveys your meaning accurately and professionally
What our customers say
“Great fun, thought provoking and an undoubted benefit to improved writing.”
JG – DK Architects
“Excellent pace all subjects covered well without going into too much detail. A clear simple method to ensure the information sunk in.”
GH – eMap Automotive
“Good refresher and I picked up a few things I didn't know previously.”
IS – Microsoft
How we deliver the brush up your English course
It is available as a one-day tutor-led Virtual Classroom.
Brush Up Your English Course Contents
1. Grammar – why it matters
- Why bad grammar can wreck your career!
- Lots of examples of bad grammar and where they went wrong
Pre-Course Questionnaire
When you book we send you a questionnaire which we ask you to return to us before you attend the course. This enables our Trainers to assess your needs in advance.
2. Choosing your words
- Getting the tone of your document right
- Recognising the padding you can cut out and the words you should leave in
- Knowing when to write affect or effect, their, there or they're (and many other commonly confused words)
- Other common traps and how to avoid them
- Things that make some people cross!
- Handy Word™ tools you never knew were there
3. Grammar basics – the building blocks of a sentence
- Nouns – what are they and how do you use them?
- Using prepositions to explain what's going on
- Articles – definite, indefinite; knowing when the article is not needed
- Verbs – a quick overview
- Adjectives and adverbs, their uses and abuses
Want Something a Little Different?
Give us a call today and we will tailor a course to suit you!
4. Building sentences
- Building a sentence from the ground up
- From simple to more realistic sentences
- Connecting things - and, but, because, etc.
- Cause and effect - simple sentences
- Relative clauses - one of life's great mysteries explained (which or that?)
- Deciding where to put the emphasis
5. Avoiding common problems
- Making verbs and nouns agree
- Sentence order for easy understanding - how not to confuse your reader
- A round-up of the most common mistakes, why they occur and how you can avoid them
6. Punctuation
- Full stops, question marks and exclamation marks
- Using the comma correctly
- The difference between colons and semicolons and when to use them
- Apostrophes in contractions, unusual plurals and possessives - including Plain Words' Foolproof Flowchart for possessive apostrophes!
- Hyphens and dashes - the difference between them and when to use them
- Simple rules for using capital letters and abbreviations
- Quotation marks - how and when to use them
- Knowing when to use italics, boldface, small capitals, parentheses, square brackets, ellipses, the slash, numerals, fractions and dates
7. Checking your document
- A top-down approach to improving text
- How to achieve maximum impact
- The importance of paragraphing
- Find more mistakes! The most effective ways to proofread your writing
8. Other resources
Enquire about a course Now!
For the timetable of all courses see the schedule.
For more details you can enquire about a public course, enquire about a private course, call us on +44 (0)1235 60 30 22 or email .
