Write it Well — Singapore and San Francisco — Business Communications, Training, Content, and Writing and Editing

Webinar Recording – Write Performance Reviews the SMART Way!

Natasha — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:37:59 +0000

Natasha Terk, managing director of Write It Well, delivered a one-hour session on Writing Performance Reviews last week. Participants loved her examples, activities, and enthusiasm. If you are a manager, you should watch this recording for tips on improving your employees’ performance with SMART objectives and reviews!

Drive Results – Free Webinar on Writing Performance Reviews for Singapore

Natasha — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:25:59 +0000

Please join Write It Well for a free webinar on Writing Performance Reviews the SMART Way, on Thursday, April 4, 2013 at 11.00am Singapore time.

One of the most important jobs managers have is to make sure their employees work effectively and achieve results. Clear, ongoing communications – including written performance documentation – is crucial to that process.

In this engaging, interactive, job-relevant session, Natasha Terk will show you how to write performance documentation that improves organizational results.

You will learn how to drive results by using specific, measurable, actionable, results-oriented, time-bound language to set objectives and measure results.

About the webinar:

Do your employees use vague or subjective language to describe objectives and/or performance?
Do your employees understand, specifically, what’s expected of them?
Do your employees know what they are doing well and what they can improve?
Can you measure your employees’ results at the end of a performance cycle?
Is a performance review a chance to improve performance by correcting or realigning behaviors, patterns, and priorities in order to drive organizational performance?

During the 60 minutes session, you will master these challenges and more:

Writing performance objectives and standards
Determining criteria for acceptable performance documentation
Using descriptive language
Explaining and supporting evaluations and decisions
Keeping your descriptions specific and complete

Benefits of individual writing skills coaching

Natasha — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 02:50:49 +0000

Our individual coaching programs are designed for one person – you! This short video will explain how we build custom agendas, exercises, and assignments to get results.

What we learned from Lincoln, the Academy Award-winning movie…

Natasha — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:12:25 +0000

Just like you struggle, did you know that Abraham Lincoln also struggled to be concise? Our favorite line from the Academy Award-winning movie was read by Lincoln… “I could write shorter sermons but once I start, I get too lazy to stop.” If you need help finding a way to help your colleagues write shorter email, reports, proposals, or presentations, we’re never too lazy to help.

Writing skills training – recent projects

Natasha — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:06:09 +0000

Do you want to know more about our products and services? Our new brochure presents nine case studies to illustrate a wide array of training solutions we’ve delivered for our clients.

Sneak in to our Effective Email webinar!

Natasha — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:01:50 +0000

Write It Well delivered a series of red-hot Effective Email webinars for two departments in a multinational bank. Word got around that Write It Well’s webinars were engaging, interactive, and job-relevant so employees from other departments starting sneaking in! Our client got smart and added more sessions for other departments.

Do you want to sneak in too? Here is a link to the recording of an Effective Email mini-session we delivered for a group in Singapore in December.

Social Media Lessons for Business Email

Natasha — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 06:57:38 +0000

Long-winded writing is a chore to read, while concise writing shows respect for your readers’ time. Unfocused email can feel especially hard to read.

Twitter gives you a visual warning when you go past 140 characters. Do you ever wish you had a gauge to tell you when your business writing gets too long to hold an average reader’s attention?

Businesspeople can practice eyeballing our sentences for the same kind of concision. Try to keep each sentence around 30 words or less. It’s best to feel cautious, step back, and rewrite your ideas when you see a sentence get near the 30-word mark.

Here are some more email lessons we learned from Twitter:

Tweeting is great practice for writing sharply focused email subject lines
Active language helps you stay concise
Readers are grateful when you explain your main point right away
Careful grammar, punctuation, and tone can set your business writing apart on any platform

Customers and clients have limited attention spans. But keeping your language active, focused, and concise helps persuade them that your messages are worth their time

Join our Effective Email webinar!

Natasha — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:31:25 +0000

Five spots are still available for Write It Well’s free webinar on Effective Email on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 11.30am Singapore time. During the 60-minute session, we will cover these points:

How to write clear and concise messages from your reader’s point of view
How to determine your purpose for writign and achieve results
How to organize the information locally and use a reader-friendly format

To register for the session on December 5th, click here.

December Training Materials Discount

Natasha — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 23:48:56 +0000

Through December 31, we’re offering a discount on our facilitator kits.

First, our book Essential Grammar and its facilitator kit are on sale:

When you contact us to order 10 or more copies, you’ll receive an additional 15 percent off the book’s cover price
Furthermore, you’ll receive 30 percent off the price of the book’s companion facilitator kit – just enter the code EGKit when you check out.

You can also receive 30 percent off the facilitator kit for our book Professional Writing Skills. Just enter the code PWSKit at checkout.

A Three-Step Process to Demonstrate Your Value

Natasha — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 23:18:02 +0000

Many people feel tongue-tied when we have to describe our own accomplishments. Have you ever struggled to demonstrate your value to a manager, potential employer, or other key audience? Try running through this three-step process:

State a problem you solved or challenge you tackled
Describe the action you took to overcome the problem
Explain the beneficial results

We call this problem-action-results format a PAR story. Many business writers focus too much on professional actions and overlook the context of problems or the beneficial results that actions have.

A PAR story’s problem can range from an industry-wide crisis to an unproven hunch that performance could improve. The best way to explain results is to use a story to show what benefit your organization, your clients, or your customers enjoyed as a consequence of your action.

Here’s an explanation of two benefits in a simple PAR story:

Competition in our field reduced market prices last year. In January, our company invested in fuel-efficient trucks — reducing our fuel and transportation costs by 10 percent. These savings factored into the healthy profit we showed last quarter.

Here’s the PAR model in action in that story:

Problem: market prices were down
Action: we invested in fuel-efficient trucks
Results: we saw lower fuel and transportation costs as well as a healthy profit

Results are almost always more impressive when you can quantify them. Numbers such as “doubled over the last three years” or “boosted efficiency by 40 percent” help readers grasp your meaning more easily.

The PAR story above is at an organizational level. PAR stories are also very effective at the individual level — e.g., to bring a resume to life. Individual PAR stories can also be a way for an organization to explain how it will add value — for instance, to illustrate a proposal with a demonstration of one team member’s past success.

Finally, one good way to explain benefits in a PAR story is to focus on emotions:

“Our clients felt relieved to know we had safeguarded their security.”
“Several customers wrote to say how happy they were with the improvements.”
“He said he was very surprised to see a vendor solve the problem so quickly.”

We’ll include PAR stories in our upcoming Financial Writing course. PAR stories are also part of our e-book on resumes and cover letters and part of the learning feedback we deliver to MBA students at the National University of Singapore and the University of California’s Haas School of Business.