Course Description
Course Details
Are you a writer working in the business world? Or a marketing professional responsible for obtaining great marketing copy? Maybe your boss made you the company writer, but you've never had any training. Or maybe you're just interested in a writing or marketing career. Whatever your background, this fun, introductory course will teach you to write or identify copy that achieves business and marketing goals. Improve your work, your knowledge, your company's image, and your chances of getting hired, promoted or applauded! Using clear explanations, real-life examples, and an animated style, the course solidifies the relationship between business and marketing principles and written communications. You'll learn how business and marketing objectives affect writing choices. You'll get practical writing instruction in grammar, clarity, structure and more. You'll understand issues unique to this discipline, such as buzzwords, working with a team, and marketing ethics. Whether you seek to improve your own writing or learn to identify effective copy, this course will help you understand the power of writing - and use it to present a solid, cohesive message to your target audience.
How It Works
This course is fully online, you require internet access and an email account. The course duration is 6 weeks, followed by a 2-week period to complete the final exam (online, open book). Lessons are released on Wednesdays and Fridays of each week, for a total of 12. You are not required to be online at any specific time. In addition to the specific lesson content, there is a discussion board with each lesson and often there is an optional assignment to apply the learning. Following each lesson, there is a short multiple choice quiz. Your score on these quizzes does not count towards the final mark but completing these helps solidify your learning as well as prepare you for the final exam. The final exam is an open-book, multiple choice exam and you need to achieve a minimum of 65% on the final exam to pass the course. There is only one opportunity to pass the exam. A certificate of completion from WatSPEED is available within four weeks of successful completion of each course and can be accessed in your student portal. Many of the Ed2Go courses are eligible towards the various online certificates offered by WatSPEED.
Syllabus
Lesson 1 - The Role of Business and Marketing Writing. We'll start off our first lesson with a discussion about the purpose of marketing and the goals of writing, and then we'll talk about the unique roles, responsibilities, and challenges of business and marketing writing. You'll learn exactly what business and marketing writers do, and where we stand as we begin our exploration of this exciting field.
Lesson 2 - The Ins and Outs of Image. Before you can write or recognize successful copy, you'll need to understand your corporate identity: who the company is and what the company offers. In this lesson, we'll delve into all the aspects of corporate image that writers and marketing professionals need to ponder before producing effective projects.
Lesson 3 - Writing Approaches and Strategies. Now that you understand image, what can you do with it? Building on Lesson 2, today we'll analyze business and marketing goals—and the needs of your audience—to figure out the appropriate writing style for any project.
Lesson 4 - Media. It's a creative field, but certain projects require certain conventions. In today's lesson, we'll discuss how a particular medium or project type can guide your writing style and approach, helping you save time and stay on target.
Lesson 5 - Putting It All Together: Writing Project. In this lesson, we'll gather up all the information we explored in the previous four lessons and put it all together. I'll illustrate how to apply everything you've learned so far as we develop an original writing project from start to finish.
Lesson 6 - Complete and Incomplete Sentences. Do you need to write in complete sentences? What is a complete sentence, anyway? In today's lesson, we'll go through a brief refresher on sentence construction, and we'll go over some guidelines for using fragments in business writing. You’ll also learn to recognize and fix one of the most common errors in modern writing: the comma splice.
Lesson 7 - Word Choices. You can't write without words! In Lesson 7, you'll learn to make accurate word choices. We’ll discuss the level of vocabulary appropriate for business writing, and you'll learn how to choose words that reinforce a project’s theme. We’ll also clarify some tricky word pairs and discuss word-choice problems whose usage can undermine the professionalism of our writing.
Lesson 8 - Internal Communication. In today's lesson, we'll take a critical look on the inside. First we'll discuss how to develop "marketing" projects for audiences within a company. Then we'll explore the roles of the various specialists who contribute to a single marketing piece—bosses, clients, editors, junior writers, artists, and designers. You'll learn how to work with all of them to create smoother relationships and better projects.
Lesson 9 - Banishing the Bureaucracy. For even the most experienced writers, bureaucratic influences can creep in to reduce creativity and impede communication. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at buzzwords and jargon, and then explore some ways to achieve maximum power and effectiveness by keeping your writing clear, concise, and active.
Lesson 10 - Editing, Proofreading and Evaluating. In Lesson 10, we'll explore the final steps. You'll learn to enhance and refine business and marketing projects during the editing and proofreading processes. You'll also learn to evaluate finished pieces and even test their effectiveness in the real world!
Lesson 11 - Putting It All Together: Editing Project. Today, we’re back to putting it all together, but this time as editors. In Lesson 11, we’ll apply everything you’ve learned so far in the course, editing a project from beginning to end.
Lesson 12 - Marketing Ethics. Marketing deals with images, so it's easy to lose sight of the truth. In this, the final lesson of the course, we'll go over some important considerations that marketing professionals need to think about.
