For Organizations
If we’ve learned one thing through our research and our work with professionals, it’s that every organization struggles with writing and documents in some way. We’ve had the chance to see close up the strategies and skills that build a successful workplace writing practice, and we’ve also seen spectacular writing failures and smaller catastrophes, like boring, unclear, and less-than-useful documents.
What many organizations and teams struggle to understand is that so much about developing successful writing is specific to an industry, an organization, and often even a team or department. The challenges that a nurse faces in her medical chart writing are very different from the struggles of a team of aerospace engineers--although in both workplaces, there are huge ramifications to bad writing.
We offer both consulting services and workshops for organizations on a variety of topics in written communication. Workshops range from 1.5 hours to several days, and can be facilitated virtually or in person.
wHO WE WORK WITH
We are dedicated to helping all communicators across industries and in the government write with clarity, effectiveness, and confidence. We work with everyone from lawyers to social workers, IT professionals to engineers, and all the jobs in between. If you write in any capacity—whether that writing mostly takes place over email or you’re writing complex, varied types of communication, we can help you do better.
sTANDARDIZED WORKSHOPS
We’ve found that teams and organizations across industries often struggle with similar writing challenges. In order to provide a cost-effective solution, in addition to the customized sessions outlined below, we offer a set standard workshop offerings that address common writing struggles.
Customized Consulting and Workshops
We focus on asking good questions of the people who write and edit documents—which is everyone, these days—to get at the real challenges they face.
Organizations might seek help to improve their overarching, company- or department-wide writing processes, or to improve one specific type of document that is central to conducting their work. We’re happy to share our expertise about topics like:
Writing and review processes and document management
How to help employees develop as writers over time
Disagreements over what makes “good” writing
Virtual collaboration and its challenges
Feedback strategies
Mentoring for writing improvement
Looking beyond grammar and punctuation to consider higher-order issues of audience and purpose in document
“Pre-writing” and planning tactics to help workplace writers get down a stronger first draft
Revision strategies to turn a rough draft into a polished final version
Working with models and templates (and when to abandon them)
And other challenges
Locations
While many of our clients are in the Washington, DC area, we also serve organizations in other parts of the country. Regardless of your location, please contact us! We’re happy to talk with you about your needs and how we might help.
