Business writing
When your writing is strong, your influence grows. Your clients, colleagues and stakeholders understand your message and your value. Your managers spend less time editing your work — and more time engaging with your ideas.
Workplace writing is critical to your team’s reputation and impact. The good news? It’s a skill anyone can improve with practice and guidance.
True North Content’s senior writers have written everything from submissions to surveys, marketing copy to instruction manuals. The formats are very different, but the underlying principles are the same.
We’ll share those principles with you through practical, interactive training tailored for your workplace.
- Up to 12 participants
- 4 hours
- In person or live online
What you'll learn
- Defining your purpose, audience and message
- Writing to influence
- Planning structure and flow
- Being concise
- Choosing your tone and style
- Adapting for formats (emails, promotional copy, submissions)
Who this course is for
Anyone who has written communication as a core part of their role.
Ask us about this course
At the end of this course, you'll be able to:
- Set a course for your writing: purpose, audience and key message
- Apply influence: use different forms of persuasion in your writing
- Structure your writing: craft headings, paragraphs and improve flow
- Be concise: cut redundant words, phrases and jargon
- Master tone and style: adapt your approach for your audience and context
- Master formats: write effective emails, guidance and promotional copy
Duration
This course typically takes 4 hours (in person in Canberra at your office) or we can deliver it as 2 x 2 hour sessions (in-person in Canberra or online).
Participant numbers
We can deliver this course for groups of up to 10 people at a time, so participants receive individual attention. If you’d like to train more people than this, talk to us. We can either run another session or bring in a co-facilitator to ensure everyone gets personalised feedback.
How we engage participants
This course uses a combination of:
- small group discussions (breakouts)
- collaboration tools (such as whiteboards and polls)
- workbooks.
To engage participants, we:
- challenge negative preconceptions about their abilities as writers
- share stories to illustrate application of key concepts
- model good practice
- encourage participants to provide their own stories and examples.
We also conduct thoughtful and considered de-briefs to allow learners to reflect on the activity and their application of the new learning and establish linkages to existing skills and knowledge.
Course materials
For in-person training, we can arrange printing materials, or provide the files for you to print in-house.
We prefer using printed workbooks as this allows participants to focus on the content with fewer distractions, such as laptops.
How we tailor this course
Discovery
To tailor this course, we'll meet with you to understand in detail both your work environment and the content ecosystem you work in. We’re interested in your broader goals and how lifting writing capability supports these goals.
We'll seek to understand what:
- you want to achieve through this training
- types of communications you write
- audiences you write for
- specific issues we can overcome.
We’ll uncover context, including:
- participants’ existing knowledge and confidence in writing
- participants’ roles and functions
- templates and writing style guides you must follow
- examples and case studies we can use in the training.
We’ll do this through:
- an initial orientation conversation
- desk research, including review of the source content.
Course content design
We take your needs and using our extensive experience delivering writing training, tailor this course. We have training modules we’ve tested, but we customise the material for each client. We’re very comfortable including examples and exercises tailored to your work.
We’ll do this through:
- presenting an initial outline for feedback
- developing full course materials for feedback, including presentation deck and workbooks.
- iterating on the above to meet your requirements, based on your feedback, and feedback from participants at the end of each session.
Validation
We share the materials and outline with you to make sure it’s aligned to what you need.
Trainer
The training is delivered by one of our senior team members — many of us have more than 20 years’ experience in writing, editing and digital content.
Evaluation
We check back in to assess what worked, and share what we heard from your team members.
Prerequisites
Combine training with our other offerings:
Training + coaching
We train you then check in with you during 1:1 or small group coaching sessions
Training + pilot writing
We teach you then run through applying what you learned to selected content.
Your trainers
Sandra Muller
With more than 25 years’ experience in online engagement, Sandra specialises in delivering user-centred content strategies and content production projects for organisations operating in complex environments. Her expertise spans information architecture design, content design, content governance and enterprise content management. She has worked within government and as a consultant to government.
As a plain English specialist, she creates accessible content for diverse audiences and enjoys training others to make communications easier to understand.
Dr Louise Merrington AE
Louise is a writer and IPEd Accredited Editor specialising in plain English for government, peak bodies and non-profit organisations. With a PhD and over 20 years of publishing experience, she combines high-level analytical and research skills with a strong knowledge of language and written communications.
Louise has more than 10 years of in-house and freelance editing experience. She is a member of the Standards Australia Plain Language Working Group and the IPEd Accreditation Board.
What our clients say