Professional and Organizational Development: Custom Programs

Professional Writing Workshop Series

This Professional Writing Workshop series gives employees a scenario-based deep dive into the kinds of writing essential to business. Our workshops offer a series of concepts and practical applications that provide an accelerated understanding of the subtle arts of communication, enhanced by tips to make anyone a master of grammar, concision, and clarity.

Beyond the basics of structure and style, this workshop series will ramp up writing skills and expand and refine the repertoire of your employees whether they be in entry-level positions or accomplished writers. Our coursework emphasizes professional expertise and extensive feedback as we share cutting-edge findings in the field of writing.

Format

• Delivery method: Flexible
• Times: Customizable
• Participation: Feedback on writing assignments and presentations

Learning outcomes

Non-credit, certificate of completion

Participants will find out how to incorporate their personal or corporate brand's story into every piece of communication and discover the best ways to identify and appeal to target audiences.

• Assess audience and purpose for communication targeted at achieving specific goals
• Analyze different audiences, scenarios, and contexts in order to shape your messaging most effectively whatever your audience
• Develop effective rhetorical strategies and skills to persuade specific audiences—personal, professional, and social—through visual, written, and multimedia communication
• Draft and revise written work for precision, clarity, and power
• Develop empathic and analytic skills to integrate and build upon other viewpoints and perspectives
• Learn how readers, writers, and designers use complex multimedia texts incorporating language, image, sound, and gesture to produce a coherent, engaging message
• Explore how to engage the senses—visual, aural, and somatic—to convey information effectively through social media
• Understanding how to make complex information accessible to audiences through effective visualization

Topics overview

• Intro to comparative rhetoric: In a global world, it is useful to get some grounding in comparative rhetoric as a means of grasping the basics as well as complexities of the dynamics of communication. This series will begin with a brief comparison of rhetorical traditions and philosophies to provide a grounding in globally adaptive communication styles.
• Assessing rhetorical situations: A rhetorical situation occurs when a person or organization wishes to communicate with another in order to achieve some objective. Assessing a rhetorical situation includes analyzing one’s audience and their motives and goals as well as one’s own motives and goals to determine the best rhetorical strategies to use in that situation.
• Storytelling: This workshop will focus on storytelling as one of the most powerful tools of communication and persuasion for generating emotional appeal, building brand identity, and prompting stakeholders to act. Storytelling is also a compelling way to convey and make memorable complex and sometimes even dreary information.
• Effective presentations: This workshop provides insight and guidance in the latest principles of design and content for successful presentations. We will explore how to build a powerful message, including how to develop ideas and structure content as well as form to address the nuances of information hierarchies and cognitive needs of our audiences as they process this dynamic form of communication.
• Writing for the public: This workshop will focus on strategies for writing effectively to general audiences. Focus will vary based on the selected genre:  op-eds, white papers, press releases.
• Writing in specific genres: This workshop will focus on effective processes and strategies for writing in a particular genre depending on and customized to the organization’s needs, for example, emails, reports, proposals, or memos.
• Writing with style: This workshop will focus on a simple set of strategies that will make your sentences more concise, focused and powerful. We will also explore an approach to writing that will help you effectively organize your writing, particularly longer pieces.
• Writing for social media: This workshop will explore how to use social media to create coherent messaging, enhance reputation, and cultivate stakeholder loyalty.  It also explores how multimedia texts are complex entities that bring together language, image, sound, and gesture to produce a coherent message, with demands upon the audience that involve visual, aural, and somatic modalities that need to be taken into account when organizations make use of social media.
• Dynamics of social media communication: While writing for social media can enhance the reputation of an organization and enable coherent messaging, it can also become a significant communication problem, particularly in cases where there is an organizational crisis or in the more common everyday problem of negative word of mouth. This workshop will explore the dynamics of social media messaging, how to manage its afterlife, how to prepare for and address crises and negative word of mouth to transform negative communication into neutral or even positive messaging and interaction.

Sample course schedule

Three-part workshop series - developing rhetorical presence

• Session 1: Organizational ethos
  Ethos is defined as the character and credibility of an organization or an individual. The task of establishing and communicating rhetorical presence—the desired image, voice, and work of an organization and its employees—the organization needs to have a solid understanding of its value, mission, vision, and identity and be able to communicate this consistently throughout its messaging. Being able to project the organization’s strengths and uniqueness to each other and to other stakeholders is a critical communications task, including in its effect of creating a mutually positive, respectful partnership between and among employees as well as with stakeholders.
• Session 2: Organizational pathos
  Organizational pathos is typically defined as a set of strategies organizations use to appeal to the emotions of their employees or stakeholders. Organizational pathos is part of everyday communication and rhetorical presence, but is particularly key to managing organizational change, morale, and interpersonal relationships, as well as of course sales and marketing efforts. Pathos informs an organization’s tone and consciously or implicitly also shapes the tone of its employees and their interactions with stakeholders. This workshop will focus on effective strategies for creating productive pathos, including how to use supportive and respectful language and strengthen an organization’s rhetorical presence through projecting caring, authenticity, and receptiveness.
• Session 3: Organizational logos
  This third dimension of rhetorical presence focuses on clarity of language and attention to basic reasoning strategies. Being able to concisely articulate goals, roles, tasks, and other information reduces costly uncertainty and error generated by murky reasoning and language.