Course information

Advance your grammar, punctuation and editing skills by participating in this intensive one-day ‘boot camp’ for writers, editors and business professionals. Learn how to apply the four C’s of communication – clarity, coherence, consistency and correctness – so you’re one step ahead of AI and your superiors and competitors. People who write clearly and articulately and who structure their sentences effectively are more employable and promotable.

This course is a rare opportunity to practise applying the principles, rules and conventions of traditional grammar by studying the nine parts of speech; subject, verb/s and predicate; the seven types of sentence; the punctuation marks; the three ways to set up a bulleted list (dot points); and the imperatives of writing and editing. The class is supportive and collegial, and everyone is asked to contribute.

The course is intended to be a follow-on to Deb Doyle's Grammar and Punctuation Fundamentals course, but you’re welcome to enrol whether or not you’ve completed that other course or a similar one.

Aims

The course aims are to:

• help you add value to any document by preventing embarrassing errors from occurring in it
• help you bring any document to an acceptable standard for printing and/or uploading
• empower you to justify the decisions you make, whether you’re writing or editing a document such as a report, a novel, an advertisement or an e-mail.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• copy edit a document more confidently
• construct any of the seven types of sentence properly
• recognise when more than one grammatical solution is acceptable
• introduce and maintain consistency of editorial style
• determine whether an editorial style choice is mandatory or optional
• appreciate the differences between writing (generating copy) and editing (invisibly mending it)
• prioritise ‘making peace’ with your readers by producing copy that's pleasant, effective, alive, clear and enduring
• avoid ‘making war’ with your readers by not settling for copy that’s waffly, ambiguous and ridiculous.

Content

The topics included are:

• the four ‘registers’ of English: formal, informal, jargon and slang
• the differences between speech and writing
• the nine parts of speech, including an exercise in colour coding them
• the subject, verb/s and predicate of a clause
• construction of English: phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs
• simple, compound, complex and compound–complex sentences
• a pre-homework exercise in writing a 100-word piece, and an in-class exercise in editing and cutting a partner’s piece
• the punctuation marks
• the three ways to set up a bulleted list, including an exercise in reworking a ‘hanging list’
• multiple-choice questions about grammar, punctuation and editorial style
• an exercise in copy editing an article to correct the grammar, convert American spelling and punctuation to British–Australian and make the editorial style consistent
• the importance of editorial stylesheets, including establishing your own generic stylesheet.

Intended audience

The course is suitable for anyone who works with words in a professional, business or educational setting.

Prerequisites

The only prerequisite for this course is reasonable fluency in the English language. The course is pitched at the level of people who wish to improve their written English and justify the choices they make.

Delivery mode

The course is a face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop.

Delivery style

Delivery is in the form of both an explanatory lecture and a hands-on workshop that includes interactive group exercises.

Before the course

Please bring a four-colour pen – blue, red, green and black – and an A4-size ruled writing pad.