Brush Up Your English! – Training Course Outline

In this world of text and emails does anyone really care if we make the odd grammatical mistake or write rambling sentences with little or no punctuation?

Well, actually yes. Lots of people do! Not only do bad grammar and punctuation make even the simplest document harder to read but they also reflect badly on the writer. A recent, informal survey found that a reader’s perception of the writer’s IQ falls by five points with every grammatical mistake. In other words, grammatical mistakes can make you appear less bright to your colleagues, boss and clients than you actually are!

If you don’t want bad grammar to wreck your career it’s time to get back to basics and pick up a few tips on how to avoid the most common mistakes in English.

It doesn’t matter whether you are writing an email, a letter or a report – good English is going to help you reach your audience and get the result you want – without annoying them with simple grammatical errors. On this course, you will learn how to overcome some of the most common grammar challenges and how to communicate in an effective and professional way.

What you will learn on this course

By the end of the course, you will know how to:

• Recognise and avoid the common grammatical mistakes that everybody makes
• Choose the right kind of words for your reader and make your writing sharp and concise
• Avoid doubt and uncertainty when writing more complex sentences
• Use punctuation properly – and learn why it’s necessary to do so
• Recognise and avoid commonly-confused words or miss-spelt words
• Use Word® features to check your document
• Write good business correspondence that conveys your meaning accurately and professionally

What our customers say

“Great fun, thought provoking and an undoubted benefit to improved writing.”

JG – DK Architects

“Excellent pace all subjects covered well without going into too much detail. A clear simple method to ensure the information sunk in.”

GH – eMap Automotive

“Good refresher and I picked up a few things I didn’t know previously.”

IS – Microsoft

Course Duration

Grammar can be a dry subject but the emphasis on this one-day course is to make it enjoyable. This basic writing skills course is aimed at professional people who wish to improve their grammar so they can write with confidence. It concentrates on showing you, step-by-step, how to use the basics of English grammar, sentence structure and punctuation to produce professional business correspondence and documents.

Exercises are used to illustrate various points throughout the day.

Follow up session

Get the most from a staff training day and make sure valuable ideas aren’t forgotten by booking a follow-up session. Our trainer will visit you again a month to six weeks after your course to give delegates the chance to:

• discuss how they implemented what they learnt
• go over points from the course
• practise their skills by working on their own writing with the trainer’s help

Course Contents

1. Grammar – why it matters

• Why bad grammar can wreck your career!
• Lots of examples of bad grammar and where they went wrong

2. Choosing your words

• Getting the tone of your document right
• Recognising the padding you can cut out and the words you should leave in
• Knowing when to write affect or effect, their, there or they’re (and many other commonly confused words)
• Other common traps and how to avoid them
• Things that make some people cross!
• Handy Word® tools you never knew were there

3. Grammar basics – the building blocks of a sentence

• Nouns – what are they and how do you use them?
• Using prepositions to explain what’s going on
• Articles – definite, indefinite; knowing when the article is not needed
• Verbs – a quick overview
• Adjectives and adverbs, their uses and abuses

4. Building sentences

• Building a sentence from the ground up
• From simple to more realistic sentences
• Connecting things – and, but, because, etc.
• Cause and effect – simple sentences
• Relative clauses – one of life’s great mysteries explained (which or that?)
• Deciding where to put the emphasis

5. Avoiding common problems

• Making verbs and nouns agree
• Sentence order for easy understanding – how not to confuse your reader
• A round-up of the most common mistakes, why they occur and how you can avoid them

6. Punctuation

• Full stops, question marks and exclamation marks
• Using the comma correctly
• The difference between colons and semicolons and when to use them
• Apostrophes in contractions, unusual plurals and possessives – including Plain Words’ Foolproof Flowchart for possessive apostrophes!
• Hyphens and dashes – the difference between them and when to use them
• Simple rules for using capital letters and abbreviations
• Quotation marks – how and when to use them
• Knowing when to use italics, boldface, small capitals, parentheses, square brackets, ellipses, the slash, numerals, fractions and dates

7. Checking your document

• A top-down approach to improving text
• How to achieve maximum impact
• The importance of paragraphing
• Find more mistakes! The most effective ways to proofread your writing

8. Other resources

• Books
• Useful links

Book Now!

For details of timetabled courses, see the schedule. For prices, see the costs table.

To reserve your places you can either book on-line or call us on +44 (0)1635 202013.