Writing plain English

Here is more information about each of the course sessions.

Day one

What do we mean by plain English?

This session explains what we mean by 'plain English', and why it is so important. There is a short case study about a large electricity company that eliminated hundreds of complaints a week, simply by re-wording an information card. There is also a practical exercise to show what happens when, as writers, we take our readers for granted.

Where do most writers go wrong?

Some thought-provoking, and funny, examples of real-life communications disasters from all walks of life. Through them, delegates will begin thinking about their own writing style, and the impact it may be having on readers. An important lesson to come from this session is that readers will judge us by the way we write.

Putting right the wrongs - plain English techniques

This is a short introduction to the practical sessions that follow. The trainer will link the techniques to the examples the delegates have seen so far, showing how the writers could have avoided the mistakes they have made.

Using everyday words

Delegates who would normally write 'I have to acknowledge receipt of your letter ...' instead of 'Thank you for your letter ...' will begin to appreciate the power of short, everyday words. The main point we make is that it is vital to match the language to the reader. This is especially important when writing to a large audience which may contain people having low literacy skills, or for whom English is not their first language.

Keeping sentences short

What do we mean by short? Sentences of the 'cat sat on the mat' variety would quickly make readers feel patronised or bored. Yet long sentences can confuse and exhaust readers. There is a happy medium, and we explore how to write well-constructed sentences that readers can understand.

Make your writing personal

'The bank is pleased to offer the borrower a fixed rate of interest ...' Unfortunately, unless you make your writing personal the reader's interest is likely to wander elsewhere. People tend to skip text that they think is not relevant to them. So the key is to make your writing personal and involve the reader from the start.

Writing 'actively'

This session covers two grammatical points, but in a practical way that delegates will absorb quickly even if they have never had an English grammar lesson. The first part of the session looks at the difference between the 'active voice' and the 'passive voice'. Writing that uses the passive voice has a tendency to appear dry, dull and formal. Writing that uses the active voice is much more lively and informative.

The second part of the session looks at 'nominalisation', or the practice of turning verbs into noun phrases. In other words, people will often write something like 'As a consequence of your failure to return the form ...' when they could write 'Because you did not return the form ...'. Again, spotting and avoiding this habit can help writers make their writing much more straightforward and informative.

Using lists

Using lists can be a useful technique because:

• they help split up what otherwise might be a long, complicated sentence
• important information, such as eligibility conditions, is easy to follow and understand
  and
  
• if you are advertising the benefits of something, the reader can easily home in on what is important to them.

This session shows writers how to construct effective, logical lists like the one above.

Writing effective emails

Until the late 1990s, few large businesses or government departments in the UK used email in their day-to-day work. Now people in those organisations probably use email more than any other medium. This change has happened quickly and early ideas on email usage and etiquette don’t always fit in with what today’s businesses and customers expect from a writer. This session looks at good and bad practice in writing emails at work.

Putting it all together

This part of the course is a case study based on your own documents. This will help the delegates put what they have learned into practice when they get back to their own desks. The aim is to get delegates to criticise the examples constructively, and suggest how they could be rewritten. We can work with examples that the delegates have written, or 'corporate' ones such as booklets, leaflets and standard letters.

If we work with the delegates' own examples we try to make sure no one is embarrassed. We take sentences and paragraphs that illustrate the points we have made during the day, and paste them onto two to three sides of A4. That way it is less easy to identify the writers.

If you want us to work only with corporate examples, please send them to us at least three weeks before the course. We will discuss with you which ones we feel are most suitable for the course.

If you do not want to work on your own documents, we have an alternative session that deals with writing letters and reports. There are also some longer, more challenging exercises for the delegates to work on.

Day two

On a one-day course we recommend that you have all the sessions up to and including 'writing actively'. These deal with the main plain English techniques and are vital to the success of the training. After that, you may want to adapt the programme to your needs and have one or more of the following sessions instead.

On a two-day course these extra sessions help reinforce the techniques already learnt, and introduce some new ideas.

Business letter writing

A survey estimated that UK businesses lose £6 billion every year through badly written business letters alone. This session looks at organising the information in a letter, and how to make every letter an ambassador for your organisation.

Legal writing

Surely legal writing is different? Yes it is. But that doesn't mean it can't be in plain English, or at least made much clearer. Many legal documents are already in plain English, and the law now says that consumer contracts must be too. This session shows the lawyers how it's done.

Writing reports

The aim of this session is to show delegates how to plan and structure reports in a reader-friendly way. Too many reports are unreadable. A report is not worth the paper it is written on if people don't read it. This session helps delegates to apply what they have learned so far to what many people think is the most difficult task for the business writer. There is an exercise where delegates plan and write a short report from scratch.

Grammatical gremlins

This session looks at the basic 'parts of speech'. Even some graduates confess that they do not know what a verb is, and have no idea how to construct effective sentences. This session aims to give delegates a basic working knowledge of English grammar. Is it a grammatical mistake to start a sentence with 'And'? Is it acceptable to boldly split an infinitive? We look at these and other writing taboos.

© The Word Centre 2005

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