Corporate group training
You know what you say can make a difference. When you use plain language, your readers know it too.
How we can help
Whether in-house or online, on our Plain Language Beginners course you’ll learn everything you need to know about how to write clearly and effectively. And if you’re already familiar with Plain English but need some further help, then try our Plain Language Refresher course.
Courses normally last 3 to 4 hours, depending on participant numbers (maximum = 12), but we can adapt this to suit you. We can also extend our training to cover editing/proofreading and document writing.
Contact us to discuss possible options.
What you get
- An effective and enjoyable course whose contents are tailored to you.
- Interactive learning based on our TEPL (Teach English as Plain Language) technique and including PowerPoint slides, exercises and games.
- Examples and practical exercises drawn from real documents, including those of your own organisation.
- FREE BONUS: Follow-up advice and support (time-limited).
If you’d like more information or to talk to someone, email me, Emma, at emma@phewx.co.uk or call me on +44 (0)7879 608504.
Case study: A government agency in Scotland
When the first COVID lockdown was announced, we had to quickly move our training from in-house to on-line.
Neither we nor our first 12 participants were familiar with Zoom back then, so it was a steep learning curve for us all. Nevertheless, despite couple of technical hiccups, the training was a great success.
By drawing on the agency’s own documents to shape our content and introducing some light-hearted competition, the result was both effective and fun.
‘Thank you so much for the training session this morning. We all found it very useful and engaging!’ – Alma
‘I am trying to put the training into practice already.’ – Lynne
‘Thank you for your course … I found it really useful and it has made me look at [our] documents with fresh eyes.’ – Julie
Crystal clear
After redrafting around 400 of its form letters into plain language, a section in Arizona’s Department of Revenue received around 18,000 fewer phone calls from confused customers.
As a result, it was able to process 30,000 more claims, its employees felt better because they weren’t repeatedly dealing with customer queries and customer satisfaction went up.
Joseph Kimble, Writing for Dollars
In black & white
In the 1980s, the UK government saved a whopping £9 million by re-writing 21,300 forms and scrapping a further 15,700 of them.
In just one case, a new Plain English Customs & Excise form caused the rate of errors people made completing it to fall dramatically―from 55% to 3%. This single improvement alone saved the agency £33,000 a year in staff time.
Joseph Kimble, Writing for Dollars
