Brush Up Your English! – Training 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! Not only do bad grammar and punctuation make even the simplest document harder to read but they also reflect badly on the writer. A recent, informal survey found that a reader’s perception of the writer’s IQ falls by five points with every grammatical mistake. In other words, grammatical mistakes can make you appear less bright to your colleagues, boss and clients than you actually are!
If you don’t want bad grammar to wreck your career it’s time to get back to basics and learn the rules of the English language.
It doesn’t matter whether you are writing an email, a letter or a report – good English is going to help you reach your audience and get the result you want – without annoying them with simple grammatical errors. On this course, you will learn how to overcome some of the most common grammar challenges and how to communicate in an effective and professional way.
What you will learn on this course
By the end of the course, you will know how to:
- Avoid common grammatical mistakes
- Construct simple and complex sentences without using unnecessary words and phrases
- Use punctuation properly – and learn why it’s necessary to do so
- Avoid commonly-confused words or miss-spelt words
- Make your documents more interesting to read
- 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 to 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
Course Duration
Grammar can be a dry subject but the emphasis on this one-day course is to make it enjoyable. This basic writing skills course is aimed at professional people who wish to improve their grammar so they can write with confidence. It concentrates on showing you, step-by-step, how to use the basics of English grammar, sentence structure and punctuation to produce professional business correspondence and documents.
Exercises are used to illustrate various points throughout the day.
Course Contents
1. Grammar – why it matters
- How bad grammar can wreck your career!
- Lots of examples of bad grammar
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
- Keeping your words simple
- How to cut out the ‘padding’
- Commonly confused words
- Check your spelling!
- A few common pitfalls
- Things that make some people go mad!
- Getting the most from Word™ tools
3. Grammar basics – the building blocks of a sentence
- Nouns – plurals, concept nouns, compound nouns, possessive and pronouns
- Expressing physical position using prepositions
- Articles – definite, indefinite; knowing when the article is not needed
- Verbs – tenses, transitive and intransitive verbs, phrasal verbs
- The difference between adjectives and adverbs
4. Building sentences
- Making verbs and nouns agree
- Building a sentence from the ground up
- Connecting things – and, but, because, etc.
- Cause and effect – simple sentences
Want Something a Little Different?
Give us a call today and we will tailor a course to suit you!
5. Complex sentences
- Relative clauses – how to form them and when to use them
- Advanced grammar forms: the passive voice, conditional forms, participles used as adjectives and phrases, reflexive pronouns, double negatives
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
- Hyphens and dashes – the difference between the two and when to use them
- The rules for using capital letters and abbreviations
- Quotation marks – how and when to use them
- Rules for using… italics, boldface, small capitals, parentheses, square brackets, ellipses, the slash, numerals, fractions and dates
7. Structuring your document
- A top-down approach to improving text
- How to achieve maximum impact
- The importance of paragraphing
- Title and section headings – layout and typography
- Footnotes – when to use and typography
- How to refer to published works
- When to provide a bibliography
8. Other resources
For details of timetabled courses, see the schedule. For prices, see the costs table.
To reserve your places you can either book on-line or call us on +44 (0)1635 202013/+44 (0)207 0960 749.
Plain Words Diploma in Business or Bid Writing
Would you like a professional qualification in business writing or bid writing from the UK’s foremost business and technical writing company?
Plain Words offers a full training and accreditation programme that leads to the Plain Words Diploma in Business Writing or Plain Words Diploma in Bid Writing.
To find out more email now or call + 44 (0)1635 202013.
