Written Power is a 36-hour, 12-unit program that provides you with the necessary business communication skills to write clearly, effectively and memorably.
Unit 1 focuses on understanding your reader in order to better communicate your ideas. We'll look at the reader-centred approach that is integral to business and technical writing, and we'll also consider some basic principles of effective, professional communication.
Unit 2 teaches you to write clear sentences. It provides a brief overview of the different types of nouns and verbs and shows you four techniques for converting linking verbs to action verbs in order to attract and retain your reader’s attention.
Unit 3 explains the difference between the active and passive voice, and shows you how to use the active voice to write clearly and concisely. You'll also learn the simple art of writing and editing first drafts.
Unit 4 is your definitive guide to using punctuation correctly. We'll cover commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, hyphens and apostrophes. We'll also look at why most business readers prefer that each sentence only contain one idea, and how you can make that work to your advantage.
Unit 5 shows you how to use parallelism and other techniques to bundle your ideas into powerful paragraphs. This will help you maximize effectiveness and clarity.
Unit 6 shows you how to create a positive, professional tone in all your correspondence, opening your reader's mind and heart to your ideas. The unit shows you how to create communications that take the reader's interests into full account, which is one of the cornerstones of the Written Power program.
Unit 7 teaches you the five most important techniques for organizing memos and emails. It looks at the qualities of good memos and offers tips on how to structure memos and emails.
Unit 8 teaches you how to give routine correspondence flair. This includes making requests, registering polite complaints and organizing newsletters.
Unit 9 is about conveying negative messages as positively as possible, by being firm on the principle but soft on the person. You'll learn to write both the 'quick no' and the 'slow no' letter and you'll gain invaluable insight into how to reject complaints effectively and professionally.
Unit 10 shows you how navigate the potentially tricky area of sales and collection messages by appealing to your target audience, stressing benefits and, most importantly, taking the reader's point of view into account.
Unit 11 is about writing reports faster. It addresses report writing challenges and the strategies you can use to overcome them. The unit also introduces the McKeown Method, an approach to essays and reports that can save you up to 40% of the time you currently spend writing them.
Unit 12 focuses on organizing reports better. It examines the essential qualities of good reports and how target audience influence should the tone of a report. You'll learn four ways to structure reports — descriptive, analytical, comparative and persuasive — and a few tricks to formatting reports for maximum effectiveness.
Written Power offers immediate feedback on what you have learned, as well as access to video and audio clips that reinforce your learning. It also includes the opportunity for you to have two pieces of your writing marked by our professional writing coaches.
On completion of the course you will receive a Certificate of Professional Completion for your professional development file.
Written Power does not simply teach you how to write correctly. It teaches an ethical approach to writing that takes the reader's best interests into full account. This approach distinguishes Written Power from writing programs that assume a writer-centred approach.
The principles taught in this course are drawn from the best practices of professional technical and business writers. Regardless of your writing background, learning these techniques will equip you to write at a very high level in any field or profession, from the public service to banking and engineering.
"The Written Power online course is excellent. I found the learning process very easy, the program really impressed me."
"Written Power has been a huge help in developing my writing skills. The material in Unit 5 served as a great refresher for verb tenses. Every unit of this program serves its purpose well. I will review it often, over the next month, to ensure that I retain as much information as possible."