Writing for Business Results

The ILP L&D Capability Framework identifies the 18 capabilities a learning professional needs to understand, and ILP Masterclasses are designed to assist with that and provides valuable insights and practical tips on developing their knowledge and skills.

There is much more to business writing than getting the words right. You’re more likely to get results if you plan, organise and present your content in a way that makes it easy for readers to act on. Vivienne’s approach can be used for any types of documents, whether you’re:

• writing business communications to senior colleagues in your organisation, or clients you wish to obtain, to convince them that you understand and can meet their needs, whether you are using emails, proposals, business cases, and more,
• or developing a variety of learning materials for participants.

In this session, Vivienne showed us how to identify the purpose and desired results of your documents before you start to write, so that you can clearly pin down the scope and required content of your documents.

But that’s not enough. You also need an approach that makes it easy for your readers to find and understand the information they need. Vivienne introduces you to the principles of structured writing, an approach based on the psychology of how we read, process, and retrieve information.

And we finished up by looking at best practice advice for writing and presenting your content, based on readability and usability research.

Vivienne Beggs: Vivienne has over 25 years of experience as a trainer and a writer. She specialises in both training people to use a structured writing approach for their business communications and using the approach herself to develop documents for clients. Vivienne has delivered workshops for a wide variety of private and public sector clients and professional organisations throughout Australia.