This is a transcript of one of the videos in a unit of the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
Access the full course at Plain language courses – Think-write
Writing at work is different
I’ve called this course writing well at work because I think the writing we do at work is a little bit different from some of the other writing we might do in other situations.
Functional documents
You see, when we’re writing at work, we’re writing what I’d describe as functional documents. So these are documents that are designed to do something inside your organisation. They play an important function to help your organisation move forward towards achieving its goals.
Information assets
You might think about these documents as assets, information assets and they are very valuable to the organisation
And typically they cost a bit to produce. If you think about the amount of time that people spend in researching and drafting and writing and reviewing, often there is a significant investment in these types of documents.
And the investment in these documents is intentional. We write them to perform a purpose, whether they are internal documents or if they’re going to an external audience. We have a particular intent in mind as we produce these documents.
Professional writer
As you start this course, it would be good to consider yourself as a professional writer. You’re likely doing this course because your job requires you to write a number of documents.
That is, writing takes up a reasonable chunk of your day. You are actually being paid to write, and that makes you a professional writer, at least to some extent.
So that’s a good perspective to have as you start to engage with the ideas that I’ll be talking about during this course.
Insights from a practitioner
Now, the way I present this content is as a practitioner sharing some insights, not a professor laying down the law. I’m going to be talking about things that I’ve found really useful in my nearly 40 years of working in this space of helping people to craft documents, of helping them to present, sometimes fairly complex information, in a simple way.
Now I’m sure that as we go through the material, there will be some things that you will have heard before. That’s OK. Sometimes it’s good just to get a reminder of some of these ideas or to perhaps hear them in a slightly different context.
But it could also be true that there are some things that you’ve never heard before. They’re brand new to you and that doesn’t surprise me. Because very few of us have any formal training in writing, especially if we’ve come up through the science disciplines. Sure, we learn how to write in infants and primary school. Our skills get enhanced through our high school. You might get some feedback on your essays as you work through your tertiary studies.
And then you end up at work and you’re just expected to write well somehow. Now I think that’s a bit unfair, and so I’m hoping that this course will start to fill that gap a little.
Obviously, it’s not going to fill it entirely, but it will give you some ideas that will help you improve your writing and make that writing process a little easier for you.
What I mean by ‘document’
Now throughout the course I’m going to be using the word document fairly frequently. When I use the word document, what I’ve got in mind is anything that’s being produced in text, so it could be a report, it could be a letter, it could be web text, could be an email, could be any of those things, could even be a sign where we construct some text and print it on a piece of metal and stick it up somewhere.
So I have a fairly broad idea of what I mean by the word document. These are ideas you can apply to any document. I’m not going to be talking about any particular type of document in great detail. There is some content in the advanced courses that that does dive into particular types of documents in a bit more depth, but these general ideas that I talk about in writing while at work you can apply to any document at all.
Now as you come to do the units in this course, it would be really helpful if you had a document in mind that you need to write in the next little while, perhaps in the next few weeks or so. There’s a handful of exercises through the course that I’ll ask you to do, and it would be good if you could focus your attention, focus your mind on that specific document that you need to write. I think it’s really helpful to be able to apply the principles and ideas that I talk about to a real piece of work immediately.
So, all the best with the course. I’m confident that you’ll find some things in it that will be useful for your writing. It will help you write more effectively and craft documents that are more useful for your readers.
Access the complete course at writertraining.online