Writing Skills: Writing for High Impact

Course Overview

Develop your personal communications skills so that you can break down complex issues, write key messages and express your ideas, with clarity and brevity. The ability to write in a structured, reasoned way contributes to an organisation's decision making processes and your personal successes.

Communication is a key personal competence in the MCI Personal Competency Model (this is based on best practice from the internationally recognised MCI Management Standards).

The course provides a set of strategies which will enhance your ability to write:

• reports that are clear with key information easy to find and to use.
• emails that highlight the important details and comply with the latest best practice.
• specifications and plans that clearly communicate complex information.
• company-wide messages that are concise, effective and get to the point quickly.
• product information that can be used by a variety of customers.
• presentations that make their mark with graphics and text working together.

Audience

This course is intended for anyone whose work requires them to:

• Create persuasive documents which influence decisions or offer solutions, such as proposals, tenders, business cases or analyses.
• Deliver effective presentations.
• Write documents which are used to request actions or gather information, such as requests for proposals, invitations to tender, surveys or task assignments.
• Provide information, such as new directives, briefings, meeting notices, standards, or regulations.
• Produce recommendations, such as feasibility studies or problem analyses.
• Report on events or status, such as meeting minutes or status reports.

It is appropriate for anyone who feels that they will advance their career by improving their communication skills.

It is ideal for teams who write similar documents regularly, such as status reports or tenders, or for teams who contribute to long and complex documents. Information Mapping provides consistency in level of detail, structure and presentation.

Skills Gained

This course will enable you to develop and improve your communication skills so that you can:

• Communicate effectively with customers, managers, colleagues and all areas of your organisation.
• Dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend generating reports, proposals, presentations and other documents.
• Develop materials that deliver relevant information at an appropriate level of detail for all audiences.

You will also be able to:

• Reduce decision making cycle: make your contribution clearly and concisely; use direct language and style to identify and define problems and issues.
• Focus on your readers: present reports in ways that are easy to grasp and follow; organise material in a sequence that makes sense to the reader; include only what is relevant.
• Stop wasting your readers' time: eliminate unclear, confusing, and inappropriate language; stop using words that slow readers down.
• Create quality communications for customers: project a polished image through your writing; structure your thoughts effectively; communicate your products and services concisely and consistently.

Prerequisites

None

Course Outline

Key communication concepts

• Principles governing the quality of information transfer.
• A modular approach to presenting information needed by readers.

A proven approach to organising information

• Finding a purpose and getting the desired response.
• Defining your reader's point of view.
• Pinpointing the information your reader needs.

Presenting information

• A tool kit of presentation techniques that enables you to create the desired impact.
• Effective ways to present decisions and actions.
• Guidelines for presenting policies and facts.

Refining your analysis and content

• Instant frameworks for the most frequently written reports.
• Adapting your style to your audience.
• Solving the issues of sequencing, transition and consistency.
• Knowing when to stop.

Writing Skills: Writing for High Impact / EBCO