Santa Clara University

Power Writing Workshop

August 21-22, 2007
8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Santa Clara University campus

Program Fee $1,150 (includes continental breakfast, refreshments and materials)

Do you sit in front of a blank screen waiting for the words to come?
Does your inability to convey your ideas negatively impact your business success?
Do you find yourself explaining what you meant to say rather than saying what you meant?
Does your writing clarify your ideas or confuse your readers?

Your writing tells others a lot about you...fairly or unfairly, accurately or not.

People who write well can turn their ideas into action, increasing their visibility and their value.

You know this, but what you may not know is

ANYONE CAN LEARN TO WRITE WELL.
ANYONE CAN BE A MORE POWERFUL WRITER.

Writing isn't genetic. Being good at math doesn't mean you can't be a good writer. You weren't born knowing how to multiply 12 times 3, but you learned.

Writing isn't a talent, it's a skill.

ANYONE CAN BECOME A SKILLFUL WRITER...ANYONE WHO IS WILLING TO LEARN AND
WILLING TO INVEST A LITTLE TIME AND A LOT OF ENERGY.

SCU's Power Writing workshop may just the professional push you need.

Who Should Attend:
Designed for technical professionals, people for whom English is not their native language, and anyone [in any functional area in any industry] who has said "That's not what I meant.", this two-day workshop will give you a solid understanding of how to communicate more effectively in writing.

Program Benefits:
You'll learn the strategies professional writers use...

• how to plan what you want to accomplish,
• how to organize your ideas,
• how to revise, proof, and format your documents, and
• how to adjust your strategies to achieve different purposes with different audiences.

You'll learn the ten biggest mistakes business writers make and how to avoid them, as well as the do's and don'ts, why's and why not's of writing powerful e-mail, letters, reports, and memos, agendas and minutes format different kinds of documents, as well as how to develop templates for the proposals, evaluations, procedures, etc. that you write most often.

Workshop topics include:
Overcoming Writer's Block: How to get beyond a blank screen and write on demand.

Reading with a Writer's Eye: The more you read, the better you'll write. Learn how to use good examples to make your own writing better.

Vocabulary Development: Memorizing a dictionary will not make you a good writer, but building on the vocabulary you have, understanding the relationship between denotative (dictionary) meanings and connotative (associative) meanings, knowing how to use a dictionary and a thesaurus...and when not to.

Sentence Style and Structure: The power of any prose, its ability to provide information or to elicit action, begins with the power of the sentence. Sentence power begins with the power of the verb. Learn how sentences are structured and the relationship among their parts...not diagramming but building from the verb outward.

Grammar Glitches: How to identify and overcome your own grammar "glitches," the mistakes you keep repeating, and how to avoid common grammar, punctuation, and capitalization errors.

Planning and Organizing Strategies: How to plan what you're going to say before you say it. Learn how identifying your intent and understanding your audience can make your writing more effective and how organizing before you write can make it easier to write.

Revising and Editing Strategies: How to polish your prose. Learn the differences between revising and editing and the specific skills professional writers use to make the process more productive.

Proofreading: We our juddged harsely by careless proofing, are ideas obcsured by typos and mispellings. Learn how to effectively and quickly proof your own and each other's documents.

E-Mail Management: E-mail is neither written conversation nor formal rhetoric; and yet it is both and more...Learn how to compose and structure e-mail messages effectively, when e-mail is the best means to communicate and when it's not, and how to manage the-ever-increasing-email messages you send and receive.

Business Correspondence - thank you letters, letters of recommendation, letters of request: The best written letters will get the job done, from creating a professional impression to eliciting a particular action or reaction. Learn how to write effective letters for various purposes and how to design templates for the kinds of letters you have to write again and again.

Reports and Memos: How to plan and write effective reports and memos. Learn how to develop the specific skills and strategies to achieve your goals and meet the needs of your audience without multiple revisions.

Agendas and Meeting Minutes: Learn how the quality of an agenda can affect the quality of a meeting and how the record of a meeting can shape not only the actions taken but the attitudes of the participants.

Instructions and Procedures: Learn how to avoid writing inaccurate, confusing, and, ultimately, frustrating instructions and procedures by understanding the specific needs and expectations of your readers.

Proposals: Proposals are both more difficult and easier than other kinds of business writing. Learn how to write proposals that will accomplish multiple goals and reach multiple audiences (the difficult part); and learn how to develop and adapt proposal templates, dividing a large task into smaller parts (which is truly easy, once you learn how).

Document Design: How emails, letters, memos, and reports look and are arranged on a page can clarify or obscure their meaning.

Collaborative Writing: How to write with a partner. Learn how to share authorship with a partner you may never have met in person, how to develop protocols for generating and structuring your ideas, revising and editing your documents, and using technology to your advantage.

About the Instructor: Dolores laGuardia teaches business communication classes at Santa Clara University and has worked as an international communications consultant, from assisting the [then] newly integrated Russian government in training and curricula development to designing training materials for Fortune 500 companies such as SGI, SBC, Hewlett Packard. She has co-authored four writing textbooks, including American Voices (McGraw-Hill), now in its seventh edition. laGuardia often identities herself as a "hired pen," for her writing skills have taken her to not only the former Soviet-bloc but throughout the Middle East and Europe, places cop's kid from Reno never could have expected to go but for her ability as a writer...an ability anyone can acquire.

What people are saying about her workshop:

"I loved your workshop and came away with all kinds of ideas I can implement right away. My boss is already commenting on how clear and to the point my emails have been since your workshop. Thank you so much for such a valuable learning experience."
Suzette Gates, Director
Research & Development
Apple Computers

"One of the biggest mistakes I made was to delegate writing tasks, simply because I didn't think I wrote well enough to make a good impression on our clients. Dolores helped me identify what I did (and didn't know) then showed me what to do and how to do it. This workshop was one of the best investments I have made. I highly recommend it, especially to upper-level management."
Leung Tran, COO
NetSecure, Ltd.