Reviewing content masterclass
As a leader, you spend so much time giving feedback on your team’s writing. After all, your team’s reputation and impact is at stake.
But is your feedback working? Is your team’s writing getting better, or are you making the same changes over and over again? When you review their writing, are you focusing on the right things?
This 1:1 training session will help you offer feedback that adds value.
Tap into True North Content’s experience in a leading, award-winning content practice. Our senior writers and editors give feedback to other writers at every stage of their professional development, and every part of the writing process. From strategy to structure, sentence mechanics to copy-editing, we’ll share our experience with you.
- Up to 4 participants
- 2 hours
- Live online
What you'll learn
- Assessing content’s alignment with your strategy and audience needs
- Understanding the different types of editing, and what to prioritise
- How writing and reviewing content can be more efficient
- How to identify improvements in your workflow
- How to give constructive and actionable feedback on writing
This course is for:
Leaders and managers who review their team’s written work.
Ask us about this course
At the end of this session, you'll be able to:
- tie each writing piece back to corporate goals and strategy
- know your stakeholder preferences, and how that informs your review
- understand the difference between strategic, structural and copy-editing, and where your review adds the most value
- optimise writing processes and templates to streamline writing
- review content for structure, conciseness, clarity and flow
- give constructive and actionable feedback.
Duration
This training typically takes 2 hours online.
Participant numbers
We can deliver this training 1:1 or for small groups of up to 4 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
We can 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.
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
How this course aligns with government standards
This course aligns to:
- the Australian Government Style Manual
- the APS Work Level Standards Leadership and Accountability at the APS 6 – EL2 levels.
Packages
Consider combining this session with 1:1 ongoing coaching.
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.
What our clients say