Efficient Writing

Write clear, concise text everyone can understand

 All writing should be clearly understood by the reader.

Whether you are dashing off a quick email to your workmates or preparing a complex business report, your writing needs to be clear, concise, and correctly spelt and structured. During this course you will learn the fundamentals of correct and efficient writing.

• For people who wish to brush up on their writing skills, or obtain basic skills which they should have but did not develop properly while at school.
• Develop confidence and ability to write better at work, at home, anywhere
• Learn to write clearly and efficiently
• Learn to communicate thoughts in the minimum number of words, and without any ambiguity.

Lesson Structure

There are 6 lessons in this course:

1. Introduction
   • Scope of writing -where is writing used
   • What is effective writing
   • Good writing is direct
   • Good writing is objective
   • Variety is good in writing
   • Understanding human communication
   • The communication process
   • Types of communication (verbal, non verbal, etc)
   • Communication channels
   • Communicating efficiently
   • Writing for a purpose
   • Understand your reader
   • Content
2. Basic Writing Skills
   • Parts of speech
   • Types of nouns -proper, common, collective
   • Plurals
   • Possessive nouns and pronouns
   • Types of verbs: regular, irregular etc.
   • Adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions
   • Common grammmatical errors: comma splices, fragmented sentences, dangling modifiers, etc
   • Sentence construction
   • Types of sentence: declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, etc
   • Sentence structure
   • Constructing sentences
   • Combining sentences
   • Expanding basic sentences
   • Adding modifying words, phrases or clauses.
   • Linking words or phrases
3. Clear Wording
   • Introduction
   • Common causes of confusion: homophones, malopropropisms, etc
   • Ambiguity
   • Making meanings clear: Illustrative context, glossing, etc
   • Informative language
   • Persuasive language
   • Imaginative language
   • Other types of language: colloquial, formal, informal, etc
   • Simplicity
   • Building a paragraph
   • General guidelines for effective writing
4. Concise Wording
   • Conciseness
   • Circumlocution
   • Condensing your writing
   • Common problems contributing to lack of conciseness
   • Active and passive voice
   • Condensing text: how to Precis
5. Punctuation and Accuracy
   • Punctuation purpose
   • Semi colon, colon, dash, comma
   • Spelling
   • American or English spelling?
6. Planning what you write
   • Business formats
   • Business letters
   • Planning what you write
   • Writing a media release
   • Writing an answer or an essay
   • Academic writing, verbs, quotations
   • Unpack the question
   • Research
   • Referencing

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

Aims

• Define the nature and scope of writing.
• Discuss the way written sentences and paragraphs are properly structured.
• Develop an increased capacity to write clearly.
• Develop improved conciseness in writing.
• Develop improved punctuation skills.
• Apply basic writing skills more efficiently in a range of situations.

LEARN TO UNDERSTAND SENTENCES – the starting point of writing

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete idea. It can be as short as “Hello!” or quite long, as this sentence is.  

Most sentences are made up of the following elements:

• Words or groups of words that identify things, places, people or ideas;
• Words or groups of words that tell us more about these things, place, people or ideas;
• Words or groups of words that identify actions, acts of being or feeling;
• Words of groups of words that tell us more about action.

These basic elements may be combined or joined into good sentences by using linking words or phrases. Their function is to connect parts of a sentence.

To summarise, the building blocks of a sentence are:

• parts that identify or name things, states, actions or ideas;
• parts that modify (tell more about) them;
• parts that connect or link other parts.

To write correct sentences in English, we must organise these elements in certain ways. If a sentence is not correctly structured, it might be misunderstood or it simply may appear clumsy and amateurish to the reader. Therefore, correct sentence structure is very important.