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 

1. Introduction
2. Gender Equity in Modern Communication
   

• • 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?

3. 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.