Advanced Writing Skills

Overview

In this workshop you will build on your basic writing skills to develop clear and effective strategies to engage readers through examining the structure of storytelling. Through practical exercises you will learn to identify areas for improvement in your writing and overcome any challenges you may have. This workshop will enable you to critique and edit your own work and that of others.

Course Content

• The role of storytelling when constructing a piece of writing
• The importance of planning and structure
• Tone and style for clear and unambiguous writing
• Editing tips to avoid numerous and time-consuming revisions
• How to identify and focus on your reader’s needs
• Awareness of sentence structure
• What to bear in mind when you write for the screen rather than the page
• Useful resources for style, web publishing and digital accessibility

Questionnaire to complete before you enrol

Before you enrol for Advanced Writing Skills please take a moment to go through this questionnaire. It is a brief checklist of what you will need to know if you want to benefit fully from the course. If you are not sure about any of the below, we recommend that you take one or both of our introductory courses: Grammar and Punctuation Essentials and Writing with Style - The Power of Plain English. You will then be well prepared to tackle Advanced Writing Skills.

1. You can identify these parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns.
2. You understand the basics of sentence structure, and what constitutes a sentence.
3. You are able to distinguish active verbs from passive verbs.
4. You know how to use correctly the basic elements of punctuation:
   • full stop
   • comma
   • semi-colon
   • colon
   • hyphen
   • dash
   • apostrophe
   • parentheses.

5. You can construct and set out correctly bullet-point lists.

6. You understand how to structure paragraphs for meaning and readability.

7. You are aware of how to make your writing reader-centred.
8. You know which Australian Government reference book to use to answer questions about correct usage, style and lay-out in professional writing.

Course Outcomes

• Produce high quality documents across a variety of platforms
• Understand and respond to the demands of writing for the screen as opposed to the printed page
• Can help colleagues use shared criteria to rewrite and edit their work
• Can adapt style and register to create documents for a range of readers

Benefits to your organisation:

• Reduce time that managers spend editing and rewriting documents produced by their team
• Create a shared understanding of what constitutes good writing
• Project a consistently professional image through written material
• Employees can work independently to create high quality documents for both print and digital media and for a range of readers

Benefits to you

• Increased ability to work independently
• Increased confidence in writing and editing skills
• Increased productivity in all aspects of writing and editing