Nearly all documents in a corporate setting are reviewed before release. The review process is great when it's working well, but can be very destructive when it's not.

Enjoy all the content of the Writing well at work. series.

These 6 courses combined cover the entire content of Think-write's full-day face-to-face course.

Work through the videos at your own pace and at a time and place that suits you.

A first draft is never the finished product. Refining, reviewing, and testing transforms a document that's done into one that works.
And ultimately, there's only one person whose opinion about your document actually matters: your reader. Not you, not your colleagues. The real test of any document is whether it does its job in the real world, with the people it was written for.

Complex ideas don't require complex writing. In fact, the opposite is true — the more complex the idea, the more your writing needs to get out of the way.
These five techniques are the ones effective writers reach for most often. They work across any document, any topic, any level of complexity. And they're genuinely easy to learn and quick to apply.

Documents can fail before a single word is read — because the structure is wrong.
When content is organised well, ideas land clearly and readers get exactly what they need. When it's not, even great writing gets lost.
This course explores how to structure content so it works for your reader. We cover three practical approaches to organising information, and suggest helpful structures for some of the documents you write most often.

Many documents have a content problem: too much, too little, or the wrong things entirely.
Without deliberate thought about what to include — and what to cut — it's easy to ramble, bury the important stuff, or leave out something your reader actually needed. The result is a document that feels complete to you but doesn't work for them.
Good content selection isn't just about knowing your subject. It's about balancing two different agendas: what you want to say, and what your reader needs to hear. Those aren't always the same thing — and learning to tell the difference, and judging what matters most, is one of the most useful skills a workplace writer can develop.

Most writing problems start before a single word is typed.
When we dive straight into drafting — which is tempting, especially under deadline pressure — we often end up going in the wrong direction, then backtracking. The document takes longer to write and often misses the mark.
Effective workplace writing starts with two questions: What does this document need to achieve? And how is my reader likely to react to it? Without clear answers, you're essentially writing in the dark — producing something that feels complete but doesn't actually do its job.

Before we get into the practice of plain language writing, we need to talk about principles.
Most people think plain language writing means short sentences and simple words. It's much more than that. At its core, plain language means putting readers first — recognising that a writer's job is to serve the person reading.
At work, writing isn't just communication. A document is functional asset that must be effective and efficient. Your documents need to do something — persuade, instruct, inform, move people to act. That changes how you approach the entire writing process.