You'll update your writing skills and excel in today's e- writing environment with the tools offered in this timely self-study. Packed with guidance attuned to current business writing and presentation challenges, the course features special strategies to speed online research and guidelines for creating safe and savvy e-mail. Through interactive, self-directed exercises, you'll acquire the techniques that professional writers use to research, draft, compose, and edit their work. Examples and checklists will keep you on track as you practice writing better letters, memos, proposals, reports, and e-mail (with its own rules and etiquette). If you struggle to find the words and tone appropriate for given situations, you'll appreciate the advice on selecting language that works. There's also plenty of help with those niggling questions about grammar and punctuation. Once you've completed this course, your writing will be more effective, polished, and direct. It will distinguish you and help you move ahead, whether you're an administrative assistant or company officer.

Learn how to :

• Identify your audience
• Organize your material
• Write clearly and effectively
• Master the steps of editing and rewriting
• Conduct online research thoroughly and quickly
• Compose e-mail that communicates your message efficiently
• Avoid common pitfalls of electronic communications
• Use writing to eliminate misunderstandings

The Institute for Certification, a department of Professional Secretaries International� – the Association for Office Professionals�, will grant points toward CPS�recertification to qualified individuals who successfully complete this course.

Course Objective:

Employ techniques to research, draft, compose, and edit professional documents. Follow guidelines for writing appropriate and effective e-mail and learn to conduct on-line research.

About This Course:

As one course among many offered by the American Management Association's curriculum, How to Sharpen Your Business Writing Skills is designed for current and future managers. Even with the rapid changes in communication technology, writing remains a basic and crucial skill for businesspeople at all levels. In this course, you will learn what constitutes good writing and how you can achieve it through specific and practical strategies.

Beginning with prewriting steps, you will learn how to write for your readers, do research, and organize your material logically. You will learn techniques for forceful, direct, and effective writing; review the basics of grammar and punctuation; and be alerted to common pitfalls and ways to avoid them. Through explanations, examples, checklists, and self-directed exercises, you will practice these techniques, focusing on the types of writing managers do most often-letters, memorandums, proposals, reports, and e-mail. Finally, you will consider some issues that new communication technologies raise for business writers. Because good writers develop their ability through practice, How to Sharpen Your Business Writing Skills is interactive, allowing you to put the suggestions you read to immediate use. In addition, the lists and summaries will serve as a useful reference after you complete the course.

Good business writers know how to communicate information, present and defend their ideas, and persuade others to adopt their point of view. Through this course, you will have the opportunity to join their ranks by learning how to make the written word work for you.

Nan Levinson is a writer and teacher. Her journalism has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and American Way, as well as online and in publications abroad. She was the U.S. correspondent for the international magazine Index on Censorship for eight years and is working on a book about people caught in free speech controversies. In addition, she has published short stories and two cookbooks. Levinson teaches writing at Tufts University and previously taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Bentley College, and Sangamon State University. Before that, she spent a decade working in arts management, including a term as the Executive Director of the British American Arts Association/ U.S. She is the author of five AMA self-study courses, among them Listen and Be Listened To and Word Power. How to Build Your Vocabulary.

The publisher would like to thank Naomi Gibbs, a Training Associate with Piedmont Associated Industries in Greensboro, North Carolina, for her review of the manuscript of this course.

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