TRAINING.

Overview

2 – 3 hour classes with homework between

After participating in this course, you will be able to:

• Identify the standard components of a typical industry or government report
• Understand what is necessary, and not necessary, to include to please the client
• Know how to use fewer words to deliver stronger, more readable communications

Description

The course addresses the fundamentals of consultant reporting (scientific, engineering, and business), and, particularly, addresses the most common and problematic issues and problems identified by senior consultants.

Participants will leave this course with a greater confidence that they can produce great reports, and even lead their peers in understanding the requirements for excellent reporting communications.

Course Outline:

• The structure of a report and delivering a solid message
• Client-focused readability strategies
• Correctness: Numbers, metric, capitalization, and English usage

Who Should Attend

The course is designed for any technical professional who needs to write in the course of their work, whether that is reporting, e-mails, or marketing. Professionals who need to interact with colleague writing also enjoy having this theoretical background to facilitate their professional communications about language.

This includes all engineers, scientists, sales staff, business people, and support staff for those industries.

Participants from new professional or even student writers, to those who have been in industry for forty years, have said that they find value in the strategies that Bedwin offers. Thus, this course is an excellent introduction to writing, and also can provide a confidence-building or relaxing refresher course for professionals with 1, 2, 3, or 4 decades of experience already.

Please note: You can check other time zones here.

Syllabus

Syllabus

Your audience

• appropriate language for technical, government, and public audiences

Leading with strength

• the full introduction and all its pieces: executive summary, introduction, conclusion, and table of contents

Pacing

• Signposting, sentence length, and shape of text
• active and passive voice

Correctness and consistency

• metric, numeracy
• spelling, including international considerations
• capitalization
• Canadianization

Readability

• how to use fewer words
• how to use images

Instructor

Christa Bedwin , BEd, BSc (Chemistry), CYT

Christa is a Senior Technical Editor with 25 years of experience coaching scientific and engineering writers. She edits for educational and trade publishers, industry, government, and academia. Her specialties are education, chemistry, engineering, and the environment. Christa teaches technical writing to professional engineers and scientists in Canada and internationally, and has published several textbooks about technical writing for scientific reporting consultants. She has contributed chapters to Editors Canada’s books Editing Canadian English and Editorial Niches.