As you are well aware by now there was a memo circulated recently that was a very poor reflection on our company. Unfortunately the memo was seen by a client and those on the sales force has been suffering from very low morale. I’m requesting your support in starting a workshop on improving individual writing skills. At this point in time I don’t think that there is a more important project. It is extremely clear that we need to help our coworkers learn how to communicate more effectively. As unfair as it may seem, we are judged by the way we communicate, the words that we use, and the way we use them.
I plan on breaking the workshop into three main categories; Content in Context, Back to Basics, and Making the Most of Your Tools. These categories will be able to give each person a very strong foundation in written communication. They’ll be able to walk out of the program and feel very confident with their newly honed writing skills. With that renewed sense of confidence morale through out the company will once again be at an all time high.
Additionally, this will have a drastic impact with our clients and partners. Upon completion of the course these collaborators will notice a drastic difference in they way we are communicating. They’ll feel more comfortable working with us just knowing that we, as a company, care enough about ourselves to correct our own short comings. Not to mention that we are an organization that is willing to go the extra step for personal growth.
Content in Context:
Simply put, know what you are talking about! It’s not enough to know what a couple of buzzwords. You need to understand what they mean and why those buzz words are creating a stir in the marketplace. When you care enough to educate yourself it projects outward. People will see that you are the type of person that will go the extra step to make sure you are in the know. If it takes a little time to research your topic before writing about it, than do it. It’s worth it in the end. Nothing sounds more foolish then someone writing about a topic that they don’t understand. It will come across in your writing.
Know your audience. This is a major first step in the writing process. You will write very differently for the CEO then you would for the guys in the IT department. The type of audience will dictate if the tone, the type of information, and the way it’s presented, ...
... middle of paper ...
...a typewriter up close. I’m pretty sure they couldn’t even explain why the keyboard is laid out like it is. To the matter at hand; our friends at Microsoft and Corel have packed more features in to our word editors than we realize are there. This workshop will teach our employees the benefits of tools such as Thesaurus, Hyphenation, and the all mighty Spellcheck. And yet we’ll just have scratched the surface of what’s available in these applications.
If you know where to look the web you can find enough resources to make you dizzy. The web is teaming with dictionaries. From the traditional Oxford English Dictionary to the Collins Business Dictionary there are resources to suite what ever need you can dream up. But more importantly the workshop will teach you how and when to use them.
Bring it Together:
To close out the workshop we’ll show the employees how to utilize all these tools in harmony to gain the maximum effort. It will help to illustrate how just taking more care in our writing, using the basics of grammar in conjunction with the tools available can make a world of difference in how we present ourselves and the company to the outside world through written communication.
Sam Dillion wrote “What Corporate America Can’t Build: A Sentence” for an audience of college students, employees and corporate people. In his article, Sam points out that companies are spending a lot of money annually on remedial training. According to Sam, the writing problem appears in e-mails, reports and texts. He is informing his audience to brush up on writing skills before entering the corporate world, in order to avoid remedial training. Companies like to hire employees with excellent writing skills but many of employees and applicants fall short of that standard.
Lucy Calkins described the writing workshop as a deliberate predictable environment with three basic components: teaching time, writing time and sharing time (Rog 2). Children need structure
For the past 112 years, De Beers has dominated the diamond industry. Established in April 1880 by Cecil John Rhodes and his partner, Charles Dunell Rudd, De Beers rose to prominence, merging with Barney Barnato’s Kimberley Central Mining company and acquiring more and more mines (Hauser, 2002). The ...
I have always known that writing was not my strong point. Entering writing 101 in September I was very much afraid. I knew that the expectations would be very high for this course; thus it would be more difficult than any other writing class I had previously taken. At first writing was a nightmare for me, but thanks to the assistance from professor Smart and my tutors, I have improved drastically in my writing skills and, as a result I am now a better writer. During the course of four months, I have learned so much. There were a few bumps in the way throughout the semester, but I managed to overcome them. It is hard to believe that my journey in writing 101 is coming to an end. Through my hard work and dedication, this class has helped me to build confidence in my writing that will help me throughout my college life.
“LOL” and “BRB” are common uses of words that we utilize in our communication. These phrases create a simplicity to our writing and provide enough information to convey our point. While this form of communication would get straight to the point in a general conversation, it is certainly unprofessional in a different perspective. With supporting texts from “The Joy of Texting” by Lynne Truss and “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why” by Kyle Wiens, they defined clearly that these types of casual writing can ultimately become detrimental in our professional careers. As casual writing has greatly expand towards our daily lives, we should ask ourselves whether this informal writing is affecting our professional lifestyle. With
writing” by R. Ramsey, the ability to write competently is a requirement for success in any field.
Any craftsman knows that you need the right tools to complete a project successfully. Similarly, people need the right language and usage to communicate in a positive way. How people write is often a problem because they don’t have the right tools, but a bigger problem occurs when a writer “is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything at all” (592). If a writer carries this mentality, why try to communicate in the first place? People need...
Big Data is being widely utilized by large corporations and the government for many practical uses, tracking crime, finding terrorists, redefining shopping, and changing how we go about everyday life. Price says that big data is leading to large advances in medicine, social sciences, astrophysics, business, and crime fighting. According to IBM, 90% of the worlds Big Data...
Writing is an important part of everyone’s life, whether we use it in school, in the workplace, as a hobby or in personal communication. It is important to have this skill because it helps us as writers to express feelings and thoughts to other people in a reasonably permanent form. Formal writing forms like essays, research papers, and articles stimulates critically thinking. This helps the writer to learn how to interpret the world around him/her in a meaningful way. In college, professors motivate students to write in a formal, coherent manner, without losing their own voice in the process. Improving your writing skills is important, in every English class that’s the main teaching point; to help students improve their writing skills. Throughout my college experience I have acknowledge that
Big Data is a concept that has existed for a while, but only gained proper attention a couple of years ago. It can be described as extremely large data sets that have grown so big that becomes almost impossible to manage and analyze them with traditional data processing tools. Big Data can be used by enterprises in by building new applications, improving the effectiveness, lowering the costs of their applications, helping with competitive advantage, and increasing customer loyalty. It can also be used in other industries to enable a better system and better decision-making. Big Data has become a valuable asset to everyone around the world and continues to impact society today.
Furthermore, I feel that doing this paper and presentation will give my classmates what they need to communicate properly in their future jobs. It is very important because without it we would be lost.
During the course of this semester; the variety of writing styles and essays assigned to me in my communication skills class encouraged the development of my writing skills, as well as provided me with more self-assurance in my abilities. My writing, research, and presentation abilities enhanced through practice, determination, and the understanding I gained during this course. With every single writing assignment, I learned new innovative approaches and skills, which enhanced my abilities to improve my thoughts logically, enabling me to write more clearly, and to organize my papers more effectively. At the beginning of this semester; despite the fact that I already knew the terminology MAP: message, audience, purpose; I never really understood the significance of MAP. For this reason, my writing lacked clarity, organization, and my writings appeared less focused on the topics. As a result my research papers and essays did not flow as smoothly from one passage to the next. Furthermore, I was unaccustomed with the precise procedures used when writing an essay. For instance, my previous classes before college, although requiring a reference page, did not require me to include proper citations in my writings. After evaluating the quality of my writing toward the end of the semester, I recognized vast improvements in several areas of my writing. By concentrating on the beginning stages of my writings, I could distinguish ahead of time my audience and my message. As a result, my essays are clear, and I remain on topic. In addition to that using transition phrases efficiently also helps my writing to flow smoothly. The proper use of transitions makes my writings easy to follow from one topic to the next. I also learned that pre-writing...
Our every day life has changed forever, thanks for the ubiquitous smart phones and technology dependent information age. We leave a trail of data while travelling, shopping, driveing, bloggin, and even voting. All of these activities leave a digital signature unique to us, which if analyzed can predict our next move. Similarly, a large set of data is being created each day by businesses, researchers and the World Wide Web. According to an estimate by the government, there are about 1.2 zettabytes (250 billion DVDs) of electronic data generated each year by everything from underground physics experiments and telescopes to retail transactions and Twitter posts (Mervis 22). This data growth has created a new challenge and opportunity. The challenge is that, we don’t have sufficiently trained people to analyze Big Data. The opportunity is that if you have the right resources who can transform Big Data to a meaningful use, you guarantee the success of your business.
One thing I learned in writing class this year is what I do that I am good and not good at writing. For instance, I learned what my strengths were. I have found out from the many pieces I have written that backing up my arguments with strong details, examples, and quotes has been something that I have been good at. I have realized this because I did really well on my community leader’s persuasive essay where you were to convince the leaders to use the money to what you think. I did a really good job and I realized that I was good at supporting. Maybe I should do speech and debate. Secondly, I found that I have some weaknesses. “Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses.” This quote by Marilyn Savant is really what sums up writing abilities. I have never been able to write creatively, only informational. I have not yet developed the ability to combine those two to make it “fun” yet informational. Sometimes, my greatest strengths come from my weaknesses. Finally I have learning the type of writing I like the best. Persuasive and informational are the two types of writing that I excel in. I am a person who does not think outside of the box; I just focus on the f...
Such frustrating scenarios are not uncommon in the learning center. Developing and practicing effective personal writing skills is crucial for recording individual expression and communication, logging personal experiences and preserving a culture’s civilization (Powell, Harms and Barry, 2006). Successful Americans in all walks of life depend on producing clear oral and written communication. A survey of one hundred and twenty major American corporations (Powell, Harms and Barry, 2006) finds that approximately eight million employees must demonstrate strong writing skills for employee retention and promotion. Two-thirds of salaried employees in large American companies have some writing responsibility; effective communications via e-mail and PowerPoint are often job requirements (Needles & Knapp, 2004).