Writing Workshops
You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere.”
- Lee Iacocca, Iacocca: An Autobiography (1984)
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Organizational communication (or, more often, the lack thereof) is and has always been a concern which confronts organizational effectiveness. Despite investments in communications technology and streamlining of communications processes and protocols, organizations often find that their communications issues boil down to one intractable roadblock: the individual abilities of key employees to effectively communicate with others in the organization (especially in written genres). An educational intervention of some type is therefore in order. Personally, I experienced this frequently even before my academic career began: The first part of my private sector career was spent in the field of human resources, and, prefiguring my later work in the classroom, my favorite part of these jobs always involved designing and administering training programs. I designed and conducted a writing-focused program such as this for one of downtown Atlanta’s largest corporate employers in 2013, and in so doing, I quickly realized that such remediation could help other local organizations, as well.
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For this reason, I offer targeted, multi-session writing workshops to small groups of employees whose employers feel could benefit from a quick-but-intense refresher course on the basic concepts of written communication. A three- or four-session program, consisting of not more than one two- to three-hour session per day (preferably scheduled on successive days), can imbue its participants with enhanced competence in the employment of grammar and style fundamentals, basic rhetorical awareness, and composition conventions related to whatever written genres they typically compose in at work. The curriculum of each workshop is designed by me in concert with the organization requesting the remediation, so each one is different; however, my past experience doing this has shown that the more relevant the content of the workshop is to the employee’s job, the more the employee embraces this type of professional development and views it as adding value to their career.
As a service to my profession, I offer these workshops (as an individual contractor and not as an agent or official representative of Georgia State University) at no charge for organizations within the downtown Atlanta area (i.e., roughly walking distance from Georgia State University’s downtown campus). For organizations in the greater Atlanta metro area, I may request a nominal fee for my time and travel. The organization requesting the workshop will need to provide the facilities and technology, including a quiet, climate-controlled room of sufficient size; adequate seating and desk/table space; a sufficient number of legal pads and pens/pencils for all expected participants; an LCD projector/screen with all necessary cables; an internet-connected computer with Microsoft Office Suite; and water and restrooms.
If you are interested in discussing having me facilitate a writing workshop for your organization, please contact me via email, providing the name, location, and contact information of your organization, the communications issues you believe a workshop may help, and the timetable you are considering. I will typically reply within 48 hours and we can begin to collaborate on just the type of content a workshop for your employees should contain.
As a service to my profession, I offer these workshops (as an individual contractor and not as an agent or official representative of Georgia State University) at no charge for organizations within the downtown Atlanta area (i.e., roughly walking distance from Georgia State University’s downtown campus). For organizations in the greater Atlanta metro area, I may request a nominal fee for my time and travel. The organization requesting the workshop will need to provide the facilities and technology, including a quiet, climate-controlled room of sufficient size; adequate seating and desk/table space; a sufficient number of legal pads and pens/pencils for all expected participants; an LCD projector/screen with all necessary cables; an internet-connected computer with Microsoft Office Suite; and water and restrooms.
If you are interested in discussing having me facilitate a writing workshop for your organization, please contact me via email, providing the name, location, and contact information of your organization, the communications issues you believe a workshop may help, and the timetable you are considering. I will typically reply within 48 hours and we can begin to collaborate on just the type of content a workshop for your employees should contain.
