The ability to write clearly, concisely and conversationally is increasingly rare in corporate America, but it gets documents the attention they deserve. Using real-world examples and practice, Karen shares tricks professional writers use to cut the fat, avoid embarrassing errors, and connect with readers. Attendees gain an arsenal of easy ways to immediately find and fix many flaws in any piece of writing — without becoming grammar snobs.
Bootcamp can be tailored for on-site training to address your employees’ specific writing deficiencies. If you provide non-proprietary sample documents, Karen can include examples and practice material applicable to your industry. Nationwide Insurance and Tredegar are a few organizations who have brought Bootcamp in-house.
This workshop was designed to be presented as three weekly 2-hour sessions for the University of Richmond’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies.
The standard topics are:
Class 1
- Pre-Writing: How to organize your thoughts
- Writing “rules” you can break
- Common usage problems
- Ways to achieve gender neutrality
Class 2
- Punctuation:
- Commas, including use of the serial or Oxford comma
- Commas vs. semicolons
- Colons
- How to punctuate quotes
- How to avoid apostrophe catastrophes
- When and how to use bullets
- 3 types of dashes and when to use them
Class 3
- How to write meatier titles and subject lines
- Capitalization
- Abbreviations
- How to correct specific wording issues
- How to avoid corporate-speak
- How to “Find” red flags using your word processor
- How and where to create white space
Contact Karen if you’d like to schedule an in-house workshop.
Karen Wormald 
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