Corporate workshops
Language workshops designed for the needs of your organization.
The experienced team at Colborne Communications has been successfully delivering courses and workshops in writing, editing, and other communication skills for over 35 years.
We provide workshops and seminars on the following topics:
Plain language
Writing and rewriting
Structural and stylistic editing
Copy editing
Proofreading
Manuscript evaluations
Research and fact checking
Estimating and budgeting
Using various types of software to prepare publications
Our most popular workshops are in writing, clear language training, and editing. You can keep reading for some basic information on each of these, but we tend to do the following for all our workshops:
Tailor workshops to your needs
Review and discuss writing samples
Follow up in individual sessions
Business Writing Workshops
We believe that, to be effective, workshops have to be tailored to the client’s individual situation. We prepare for writing workshops by examining a sample of recent work from each person who will be attending. We also interview an appropriate manager to determine the goals of the documents: who reads them, what message should be conveyed, and what approach is preferred.
Plain Language Workshops
Would you like to leverage and monetize your company’s synergy with a new initiative? Or maybe you want to incent customer-based dialogue re: your shifting paradigms to proactively prevent your business solutions from becoming commoditized?
Well good luck, because the average reader doesn’t have the patience to untangle verbose, vague, clichéd jargon — and that’s precisely why your organization will benefit from learning clear language skills. We’ll help you de-clutter your language and get your message across cleanly and clearly.
Editing Workshops
Are you a publishing house that wants to offer editing training to your employees? Or a big corporation whose employees know how to write snappy marketing copy but don’t know how to edit it? We can help you out.
We’ve taught editing in a number of institutions, from one-day corporate seminars to full university courses. Let us know what your company produces and we’ll customize workshops to sharpen the skills of your employees, making for concise and consistent copy, time and time again.
Writers workshops
What Do Agents and Publishers Really Look For in a Manuscript?
Your manuscript keeps getting turned down, and you don’t know why. This workshop will help you look at your manuscript as an agent or a publisher sees it. It covers the manuscript’s content and presentation, as well as various marketing considerations. It will also explore less obvious elements, such as aspects of your manuscript that drive the production costs out of reach for a prospective publisher.
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Self-Publishing
You’re considering self-publishing but you’ve heard horror stories about how expensive it can be, how poorly most self-published books sell, and so on. This workshop discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the ways self-publishing authors can get their books to market. Topics covered include editing, design, printing, e-books, distribution, and marketing.