To a degree, every course we deliver is unique to each learner because we ask everyone to bring along real-world documents they’ve written. During the course, we give them opportunities to reflect on their own writing from a new perspective. We also ask them to choose one document to revise as a culminating activity, using the techniques they’ve learned.
How We Customize Our Writing Courses
When we customize a course, we go further. We start by asking for some writing samples. You can either remove confidential content or we can sign an NDA.
We’re looking for the following:
- Sentences we can use to illustrate the techniques we’re teaching.
- A whole document to revise. We sometimes reverse engineer that document into a case study scenario by scrambling the content.
We first share our rewrites with your subject matter experts to approve or change. Once approved, we feather the sentences into the flow of the course and use them as examples and exercises. For instance, we start by showing you how to make sentences more concise. Then we apply the same technique to sentences from your writing samples. Participants find it eye-opening to see us revise writing they are used to seeing every day. You can hear the whole room quietly saying, “Oh!! Now I get it!”
Finally, we’ll ask the group to practice applying the technique to one of their own sentences.
We also provide the case study scenario to participants as prework and ask them to come to the first session with a draft.
Towards the end of the course, we give participants time to revise their draft case study. As a culminating activity, participants share their work with each other in small breakout groups and compare their rewrites with the suggested answer we created.
We provide a supplementary handout that includes all the sentences we used as examples and exercises. We also include the suggested answer to the case study. Participants appreciate having positive examples to model after the course is finished.
Is customizing for you?
Customizing works best if you are training a large group and they all write the same kind of document, such as investigative reports, audit reports or reports to council.
We find the learning points most powerful and convincing when they look familiar to participants. And customizing shows your learners you care and are committed to their growth.
