Business and Policy Writing
One-day Course
Description
Committing complex ideas to paper is difficult. A concept can be clear to you, but when you read what you have written, it doesn’t say what you really mean, and it’s full of ambiguities. The words don’t convey what you originally had in mind. They certainly followed each other to make sentences, but they often went off at a tangent, rather than elucidating the original idea. The written version has a developed a life of its own.
A further problem is that we start to accept this difficulty as normal. We depend on a face-to-face opportunity to clarify and explain our original document.
Who will benefit?
Consultants, lawyers, policy writers and others who write conceptual, non-tangible proposals.
Course outline
• Difficulties posed by writing. It’s easier to talk about ideas, rather than to write about them. Plato had the same problem. Examples and discussion.
• Solutions - structure, syntax, substantiation.
• Planning – the value of key messages, and structure to support them. Producing a dot-point outline before writing a draft. Examples, exercises and discussion.
• Clarity of expression – revision of the dos and don’ts in sentence structure, voice and circumlocutions. Examples and discussion.
• Explaining ideas – options in logical sequence; role of statistics, examples and analogies to clarify or substantiate. Exercises and discussion.
• Case studies. We work through some examples provided by the course director or the participants.
Course arrangements
The group size is usually limited to 3-6 people to allow us to work with individual needs.
Course directors have had experience in dealing with senior level participants in both the government and private sectors.