How we customize

We tailor our content to your organization, team, and documents

Learn more deeply with content that’s relevant to your work

We help participants build stronger skills by:

  • analyzing your documents for common patterns, both useful and not-so-useful

  • adapting our curriculum based on your document types and culture

  • delivering content and tools specific to the patterns we found

  • creating before-and-after examples from your documents to model plain language principles

I appreciated the tailoring of the workshop materials to our organization, using real-time, current writing examples to analyze and improve. It was readily applicable to my work and very professionally done.”

—The Civilian Complaints and Review Commission

Here’s one example of customized content

Each participant receives a customized package including a manual that looks like this and a desk-side summary of core principles.

Examples of excerpts we use as exercises

In a workshop, participants discuss the “before” examples and apply what we teach to produce the “after” examples.

  • Before

    26 words

  • After

    11 words

  • Before

    48 words

  • After

    33 words

  • Before

    51 words

  • After

    50 words

  • Before

    32 words

  • After

    13 words

Participants bring it all together in a longer exercise

This is an example we use in our investigation and decision-writing workshops.

We teach writers a series of steps from the “before” to the “after.” The resulting document:

  • is much more concise

  • has stronger relationships between findings and evidence

  • is more readable and persuasive

  • is faster for writers to draft and easier for reviewers to refine

Before—Decision

After—Decision

I will have the handbook on my desk whenever I am writing. The course was a good balance of practical, overarching principles, and practice.”

—Alberta Education

I appreciated the tailoring of the workshop materials to our organization, using real-time, current writing examples to analyze and improve. It was readily applicable to my work and very professionally done.”

—The Civilian Complaints and Review Commission

You’re not saying, “you should use this word rather than another word.” You put evidence right in front of us in a paragraph where we can see that something is better. It’s incredibly impressive.

—Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments