Who should attend?
- Middle management level employees
- Supervisors
- Team leaders
Workshop Outline:
Different types of technical/business reports
- Business reports
- Technical background reports
- Primary research reports
- Business plans
- Technical specifications
Before you start writing
- How to make decisions on the objective, the audience and what information to focus on
Layout of reports
- What every report should contain
- General layout
- Sections and section numbering
- Visual aids
Writing the report
- The format
- Major components of a business report
- Procedure for report writing
- Summary and checklist
Using plain English: style
- Readability
- Sentence and paragraph length
- Bullet points and enumerated lists
- Using the simplest words and expressions possible
- Avoiding unnecessary words and repetition
- Using verbs instead of nouns
- Using active rather than passive style
- Explain new ideas clearly
- Use consistent naming of the same “things”
- Painless political correctness
- Constructing paragraphs
Using plain English: the mechanics
- Avoiding common vocabulary and spelling errors
- Abbreviations
- Punctuation
Useful tools
- Symptoms and cures for writer’s block
- Brainstorming
- The Reframing Matrix
- Concept Fan