Deepen your editing skills
This one-day course builds on the general editing training we cover in Effective Workplace Writing. It gives editors a clear process for understanding and resolving problems in documents you edit (your own or others).
You will receive tools to work faster, more systematically, and with better results. It also explains ways to divide up tasks between the writer and reviewer to make their collaboration smoother and more effective.
Effective Editing
Improve real documents
In this hands-on workshop, each participant brings a document that needs editing—this can be a:
draft to finalize and perfect
procedure or policy to update
template to improve
…or whatever would be most useful.
We will walk you through the editing process live, so you’ll have a much-improved document by the end of the workshop.
We customize our workshops to your organization, team, documents, templates, and style guides
Workshop details
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In-person—1 day (8 hours)
Live webinar—2, 3.5-hour sessions on Zoom (split over a few days or a week).
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Anyone who reviews documents for other writers or is interested in deepening their own editing skills.
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We meet with you to discuss your group's challenges and goals
You send us a series of representative documents (and ones that need editing)
We analyze your documents
We customize our course material using excerpts from your materials
This gives your team a checklist of action items to finalize documents after the session.
What you’ll learn
Learn a staged process to edit more quickly and with less stress
Develop the ability to analyze documents quickly and effectively
Receive detailed editing checklists to use in your work
Learn a more effective process for approaching editing
Define the audience, purpose, and goal for the edit you’re doing
Assess document problems and be confident about where to start
Make objective edits, not subjective ones
Understand how to shape style to be appropriate for readers
Apply document design and formatting techniques to improve readability
Understand how to perfect tone
Find and fix grammar and punctuation mistakes quickly
Track changes and use Word’s editor tool
Know when to trust AI and when not to
Align with templates, style guides, and other writing conventions
Use peer review to give and receive constructive feedback, why it matters, and a chance to try it
Understand how and when to ask writers to make changes themselves
Articulate how to build skills to writers so they can improve
Start the conversation
Your workshop was a reflection of the very elements you were teaching—nothing extraneous. Everything was important and valuable.
— Ministry of Culture
I found this workshop to be extremely useful. Many courses are delivered to be theoretically useful, but this course is tangible. The instructors were engaging and knowledgeable.
—Ministry of Indigenous Relations
I saw an immediate and lasting improvement in my branch and the organization as a whole. Products became much more concise. The biggest benefit was that it gave people permission to leave extraneous details out. It definitely reduced the time spent on reviews and revisions.
— Executive Director of the Public Service Commission
