Online workshops

We know between the uncertainty of the world right now and budget constraints, training in person is often not possible. This page offers you flexible, cost effective, and safe alternatives.

Our approach to online

Our online offerings are the best of what we’ve learned over decades of teaching in-person courses, redesigned for online learning. It’s the same well-honed content, but delivered to minimize the drawbacks and maximize the advantages of the platform. It’s not copied and pasted. We adapt the content to what you need and the type of online training you choose.

You can choose from several options

You can choose the training that fits best for you or your organization:

• Webinars— We teach any of our regular, in-person workshops over Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or equivalent. More.

  We’ve found ways to maximize the user friendliness of our webinars and translate our highly effective in-person training to this online format. We use rich visuals, before-and-afters, exercises, discussion, chat functions, and as always, we customize the workshop to your writing and documents.

  
  

  We deliver webinars in two or three-hour sessions, with up to a week in between. This turns out to be an advantage because it gives people time to reflect on and apply the principles. (Note that you choose the rhythm that works best for your team.)

  
  

  Choose a workshop here, and contact us to discuss timing, pace of the sessions, customizing to your organization, and fees.

  
  

• Online courses— We are working hard to put all of our courses online in a do-at-your-own-pace format. See our new Briefing Note Fundamentals course as an example, with more coming all the time. More.

  An infinite number of online courses exist to choose from—but not all are equal in quality. We rethink our tried and true in-person content and adapt it to make learning engaging and effective online. This isn’t boring classroom content recorded. It’s focused, visually interesting, and varied in presentation. The content is dense, and there is no time-wasting fluff. You don’t need to take our word for it—try our free module to see what we mean.

  
  

  Self-paced courses turn out to have tremendous advantages (this surprised us because we love in-person work). Participants can learn, digest, and apply the principles in many ways, so it’s much more responsive to the individual learning styles. We have been able to include different kinds of exercises that we couldn’t include in a classroom.

  
  

• Free content— You can see us in action and pick up tips in our free online content. More.

  Take our free preview module

  This free module is an excerpt from our Briefing Note Fundamentals course, which will give you a feel for our online teaching style. The content doesn’t just apply to briefing notes, so you’ll also find it interesting.

  
  

  Sign up for our newsletter

  Subscribe to receive a new article or video about the inner workings of writers and writing every month. We will also update you on new courses as we launch them. [See below.]

  
  

  Youtube channel

  Here's where we post short videos with good tips and tricks for writers (and organizations) to hone their skills and improve their efficiency.

  
  

• Coaching— You can hire us to coach individual writers or work groups, focusing on skills or a specific document. These sessions are highly effective for resolving tricky problems with writers or their documents. Contact us if you’re interested in knowing more.

Stay tuned for Plain Language Fundamentals

We will offer you a do-it-at-your-own-pace Plain Language Fundamentals online course that teaches our core principles within the next six months. It will be a foundational course on which you can build more specific or advanced courses.

We will offer options to customize this content using your organization’s documents, so it’s deeply applicable to the work you do.

To get a feel for our approach

If you want to see how we teach, you can check out a free module of our online training or our Youtube channel.