Writing to influence
Learn how to make your case to senior executives, stakeholders and communities by tailoring your writing to their needs and your goals. From writing briefs or submissions and presentations to emails and web copy, you’ll learn simple, psychologically grounded strategies you can apply to increase your influence.
After completing this course, you’ll be more influential across all your written communications. You’ll know how to best structure your comms and apply a persuasive tone of voice to get your key message across. You’ll also learn how to apply an editorial lens to your own work and trim unnecessary content.
Using tailored content that reflects the work you do, you’ll immediately practice what you learn, so you get the most out of this course.
- Up to 10 participants
- 4 hours
- In person or live online
What you'll learn
- Setting goals for your writing
- Understanding your audience’s beliefs, motivations and needs
- Mastering different forms of persuasion — and knowing when to apply them
- Adapting your tone
- Using emotion and storytelling
- Bringing factual or technical information to life
- Being concise
- Structuring your writing for maximum impact
This course is for people who:
- write content like briefs, submissions, reports and emails for decision makers
- want to develop their persuasive writing skills.
Ask us about this course
At the end of this course, you'll be able to:
- Clearly define your writing objectives, including desired changes in behaviour or perception
- Apply the psychology of persuasion to writing at work
- Create audience personas, capturing their fundamental drivers and beliefs
- Define how you’ll adapt your writing based on this insight
- Understand what tone is appropriate, and adapt your writing accordingly
- Write at different levels of abstraction (big picture – detailed thinking)
- Distil your thinking into key points Use structure to foreground your message
- Write and edit content for conciseness
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
How this course aligns with government standards
This course was designed with the needs of the APS (Australian Public Service) in mind.
It’s informed by:
- the Australian Government Style Manual
- Australian Government Work Level Standards.
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
Matt Fenwick
Working with government is a core focus for Matt. This is because he loves the challenge of identifying, out of everything that governments could communicate on, what’s most valuable — to the community, and for the government itself. This goal has taken Matt from a career that began in legal research and plain English writing, to marketing communications, and finally to communications strategy, writing and teaching.
He is a regular conference speaker, having presented at TEDx Canberra, UX Australia and Copycon. He has also lectured at the University of Newcastle, the University of Sydney and the University of Canberra on topics ranging from legal research to internet marketing.
What our clients say