Course Structure & Syllabus
On each day of the first 2 days
- 4 hours of lectures with a PowerPoint presentation (9.30–11.30hs & 12.00–14.00hs)
- 1 hour of discussion, interaction, questions, and answers (11.30–12.00hs & 15.00–15.30hs)
- Two hours of writing exercises and tasks (15.30–17.30hs)
On the 3rd day
- 4 hours of task presentations (9.30–11.30hs & 12.00–14.00hs)
- Feedback, testimonials, certificates, and photographs (15.00–16.00hs)
Course Syllabus
- Introduction
- Gender Equity in Modern Communication
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- Distinguish sex from gender.
- Use the appropriate pronouns for persons under the law.
- Flee linguistic sexism while remaining readable.
- Learn the 15 Commands of Gender Balance.
- Use alternatives for sexist terms.
- Avoid political correctness on steroids. Revise hypercorrection.
- Are there ladies at the bar and on the bench?
- Miss or Mrs—what’s the court’s business?
- Let’s laugh legalese and verbosity out of court and out of hearing.
- Mylward v Welden
- “I give you that orange.”
- Client care, customer service, and democracy are inhospitable to legalese and verbosity.
- Write with your readers in mind.
- Use the 5C+2E formula for writing success.
- Plain English respects business and legal terms of art, but resists hocus-pocus incantations.
- Plain English retains the dignity, even majesty, of educated prose.
- Typical purposes of business and legal writing: (a) to advise, explain, or instruct; (b) to persuade, and (c) to memorialize.
- Focus on your audience, message, and purpose.
- Emphasize more with structure, syntax, and vocabulary than with formatting.
- Adopt a professional tone throughout. Forget your failed comedy career.
- Seek deliverance from leprous legalese.
- Beware of clichés.
- Implement whiz-deletion.
- Ban and/or.
- Prefer the active voice. Don’t hide the subject. Don’t bury your verbs in abstract nouns and adjectives.
- Fear not to begin sentences with Toby’s Fanta conjunctions (then, or, but, yet, so, for, again, nor, thus, and).
- Eschew intensifiers. (A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude. He pounces.)
- Learn transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs.
- Appreciate phrasal verbs and their corresponding nouns.
- Use mostly short sentences and paragraphs. Use thesis or topic sentences to introduce most paragraphs. Use transition to enhance flow.
- Embrace and implement parallel structure.
- Use possessives to introduce gerunds and solve fused-participle difficulties. Situate your modifiers to eliminate confusion. Avoid awkward separation.
- Use nominative and objective pronouns correctly.
- Watch whiches and wizthat
- Strike ‘fatuous lawyerisms,’ elegant variation, and inelegant fixation.
- Supplant redundant expressions with concise alternatives.
- Expel expletives. Minimize comment clauses and metadiscourse. Moderate authorial self-reference.
- Learn proper use of abbreviations, acronyms, clippings, hybrids, and initialisms.
- Master modern business communication: emails, letters, memos, and reports.
- Master punctuation: apostrophes, braces, brackets, bullets, colons, commas, ellipses, em-dashes, en-dashes, exclamation points, guillemets, hyphens, parentheses, periods, question marks, quotation marks, semicolons, and slashes.
- Construct lists and build tables with aplomb.
- Use mostly digits for your numbers.
- Format minimally with boldface, capitalization, and italics. Never underline anything.
- Cite and quote like a pro.
- Deepen and broaden your learned vocabulary.
- Cultivate an appreciation for semantic nuance and subtle distinctions.