This course will teach you how to apply advanced principles and strategies to produce successful business writing. It takes an immersive narrative approach so you learn how to use context to write purposeful and audience specific business texts. You will learn to deploy a range of tools and tactics so your business writing is on point, concise and appropriate, whatever the organisational culture or whomever the client or stakeholder.
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By the end of this course, you will be able to write a range of business texts showing an understanding of key features including organisational structure, vocabulary and register; identify and use a range of Business English as it functions in written business contexts; evaluate information from a variety of business texts to use in your own writing.
The skills and strategies that you learn on this course are transferable and will support successful writing in any number of other professional, personal or academic contexts.
Syllabus
Week 1
Module 1 (Lessons 1.1 through to 1.14) covers introductory material about how the course approaches business writing, the learning scenario and the learning process. You will learn about the business narrative and the company, Globe, that provides a comparable real-life context for the course. You will consider how the course approaches learning and look at the seven key questions that successful writers are able to ask and answer as part of producing texts. This module also looks at the first Output Text that you will produce as part of the course scenario, a Short Answer Response, which will involve using a structure to organise ideas as well as writing concisely and specifically.
Week 2
Module 2 (Lessons 2.1 through to 2.14) sees you complete the application process to Globe and move into an assessment centre. You will write an example of a formal letter, a Covering Letter, and a Report. You will focus in detail on two of the seven writing questions, those concerning Register and Sentence accuracy, range and variety. You will learn about degrees of formality and how to use language features to modulate register, as well as how to use a range of sentence types to best suit your writing purpose and aims.
Week 3
In Module 3 (Lessons 3.1 through to 3.14), you leave the Globe assessment centre and start your internship at Globe. You will write a piece of reflective writing, and through this text explore the different ways vocabulary can be packaged and used to improve range, accuracy, and variety. As you start your first internship project at Globe and deal with issues in customer relationship management (CRM), you will write an adjustment letter to a client and look at grammar features that are common in different text types. You will revisit register and vocabulary and consider how frequently occurring word items can affect your communicative purpose.
Week 4
In Module 4 (Lessons 4.1 through to 4.14), you will complete the first internship project (CRM) and write two emails as you seek to wrap this up. One email is to a group of colleagues at Globe who you do not know, while another is to a colleague that you do know. You will explore two further key writing questions, those of Purpose and Audience, and learn how your relationship with the audience affects your decisions as writers, not only in terms of how you position yourself using register and other language choices, but also in terms of how you use information from other texts.
Week 5
In the final Module 5 (Lessons 5.1 through to 5.13), you will start and complete your second internship project and explore ways in which you are uniquely placed to improve Globe's performance. You will write a Report that highlights your innovative and strategic business thinking and focus on the creative visual aspects of a text. Your final Output Text will be a Press Release. In this, you will bring together the skills that you have learned during the course to showcase and test out your ability to independently ask and answer the seven writing questions that you have practised during the five Modules.
