Effective Writing and Editing

Business Writing: Organizing Your Ideas

Time: 60 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Do you have difficulty "getting your arms around" the chore of writing an important document? Would you like a repeatable process to reduce your writing time and increase your effectiveness? In this course, you'll master the five "thinking steps" of any writing task so that you can select the appropriate information, details, and data to include in your documents—email, letters, reports, or proposals.

Business Writing: Writing Special-Format Documents-Part 1

Time: 50 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
How persuasive is your writing? Do your documents gain buy-in or produce a pout? Identify what to include in these special documents and learn how to structure the information appropriately: persuasive documents, directives, transmittals, activity/status reports, and requests for voluntary action.

Business Writing: Writing Special-Format Documents-Part 2

Time: 30 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Do you ever have to give disappointing news? Ask other people to correct a problem? Apologize when you've fouled up? In this course, you'll identify what to include in these four special documents, and learn how to structure the information appropriately: "bad news" messages, complaints, apologies, and congratulatory/commendation documents.

Business Writing: Editing for Content and Layout

Time: 45 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
You'll discover and practice six principles for editing documents to help your readers grasp key ideas quickly and to ensure the proper focus of your message.

Business Writing: Editing for Clarity

Time: 80 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Your documents are always clear to you or you wouldn't write them as you do. But often the less-knowledgeable reader sees gaps in logic, missing information, unclear sentences, and meaningless or imprecise words. As a result, your reader misses the point or fails to take the intended action. This course provides eight principles to ensure clarity.

Business Writing: Editing for Conciseness

Time: 35 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Your documents may contain correct and necessary information, but if you write in a verbose style, your readers may miss key points. Clear messages are the result of crisp, concise documents. You'll practice four principles for cutting the clutter.

Business Writing: Editing for Style

Time: 30 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Writing styles generally fall into one of three categories: informal, formal, or pompous. You'll learn five principles to help you select the appropriate style for your various situations, relationships, and purposes. As a result, you'll be able to achieve the tone and style that you intend with your writing.

Business Writing: Writing and Editing Exercises

Time: 40 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Practice the skills learned in the prerequisite courses by editing sample documents. You'll identify and correct errors and weaknesses in document structure, content selection, sentence structure, word choice, and style.

Good Grief, Good Grammar

Grammar Skills: How Words Work

Time: 60 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Different types of words perform different functions in sentences. In this course, you will identify the different parts of speech and learn how to use them as modifiers, complements, and in other structures.

Grammar Skills: Subject-Verb Agreement

Time: 55 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
One of the more difficult tasks is making nouns agree with their verbs. To do so, you need to be able to identify the types of subjects and predicates.

Grammar Skills: Verbs

Time: 50 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Verbs can be described by several characteristics: type, voice, mood, and tense. You'll learn how to discriminate among all these characteristics so that you can write clear sentences. Correct verb choices help you accurately reflect time, write clear procedures or instructions, and control the tone of your messages.

Grammar Skills: Pronoun Agreement

Time: 55 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Is it "Debbie and I" or "Debbie and me"? Should you write "Call either Juan, Cary, or myself later this week" or "Call Juan, Cary, or me later this week"? "The manager said to tell whomever calls the good news" or "The manager said to tell whoever calls the good news"—which is correct? Incorrect pronouns are one of the most common grammatical errors. This course will clear up that confusion.

Grammar Skills: Usage, Spelling, and Capitalization

Time: 60 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Many words have similar spelling and sound alike, but they have very different meanings. Other words have unique ways of creating their plural form. Inappropriate capitalization also confuses readers—particularly, when writing about forms, documents, groups, and locations. This course will focus on the most common problems in selecting the proper word, spelling plurals correctly, and applying the rules of capitalization consistently.

Grammar Skills: Phrases

Time: 50 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
You'll master three types of phrases: verb phrases, prepositional phrases, and verbal phrases. As a result, you'll be able to improve clarity by identifying and correcting these common problems in your documents: misplaced and dangling modifiers and unparallel structure in sentences and in bulleted lists.

Grammar Skills: Clauses and Sentences

Time: 55 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Learning to vary your sentence patterns, write complete sentences, and join clauses with appropriate linking words (equal, separate, subordinate, time, cause-and-effect links) will improve the clarity of your writing.

Grammar Skills: Punctuation (Part 1)

Time: 55 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Punctuation is to readers what traffic signs are to drivers. Learning to punctuate correctly enables readers to follow your train of thought. Misplaced or misused punctuation, on the other hand, can alter the meaning of your sentences. You'll learn to use commas, semicolons, colons, periods, and question marks correctly.

Grammar Skills: Punctuation (Part 2)

Time: 60 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
Punctuation is such a large topic that it covers two courses. In this course, you'll learn to use quotation marks, ellipses, dashes, parentheses, brackets, apostrophes, and hyphens correctly.

Grammar Skills: Perplexing Problems

Time: 45 minutes
Partner: Booher Communications (based on Dianna Booher's Workshops)
You'll identify common "taboos" in writing—the myths, the mistakes, and the misunderstood. You'll identify sticky grammatical issues and usage and learn guidelines for handling each of these questionable issues such as split infinitives, prepositional endings, and the that versus which dilemma.