Online Business Writing Course

Are you a writer working in the business world? Or a marketing professional responsible for obtaining great marketing copy? 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, marketing principles, and written communications. You will 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. This course will help you understand the power of writing and use it to present a solid, cohesive message to your target audience.

What you will learn

• Learn how to communicate marketing and business goals in your writing
• Discover the best way to align written communication with a corporate identity
• Examine methods for writing with purpose and developing a cohesive message for a target audience
• Learn how grammatical and stylistic choices can augment business and marketing strategies

How you will benefit

• Learn to communicate effectively and express your values to a target audience
• Gain confidence in your ability to reach and affect people with your writing
• Open the door to new career opportunities as you gain invaluable skills in the fundamentals of business and marketing communication

Outline

The Role of Business and Marketing Writing

The first lesson starts off with a discussion about the purpose of marketing and the goals of writing, and then talks about the unique roles, responsibilities, and challenges of business and marketing writing. You'll learn exactly what business and marketing writers do as you begin exploring this exciting field.

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, you'll delve into all the aspects of corporate image that writers and marketing professionals need to ponder before producing effective projects.

Writing Approaches and Strategies

Now that you understand image, what can you do with it? In this lesson, you'll analyze business and marketing goals—and the needs of your audience—to figure out the appropriate writing style for any project.

Media

It's a creative field, but certain projects require certain conventions. In this lesson, you'll see how a particular medium or project type can guide your writing style and approach, helping you save time and stay on target.

Putting It All Together: Writing Project

This lesson will gather up the information you explored in the previous four lessons and put it all together. It will illustrate how to apply everything you've learned so far as you develop an original writing project from start to finish.

Complete and Incomplete Sentences

Do you need to write in complete sentences? What is a complete sentence, anyway? This lesson will give you a brief refresher on sentence construction and then 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.

Word Choices

You can't write without words! In this lesson, you'll learn to make accurate word choices. The lesson will discuss the level of vocabulary appropriate for business writing and show you how to choose words that reinforce a project's theme. It'll also clarify some tricky word pairs and discuss word-choice problems whose usage can undermine the professionalism of your writing.

Internal Communication

In this lesson, you'll take a critical look at the inside of a company. First, you'll see how to develop "marketing" projects for audiences within a company. Then you'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.

Banishing the Bureaucracy

For even the most experienced writers, bureaucratic influences can creep in to reduce creativity and impede communication. In this lesson, you'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.

Editing, Proofreading and Evaluating

In this lesson, you'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!

Putting It All Together: Editing Project

In this lesson, you'll once again be putting it all together, but this time as an editor. You'll apply everything you've learned so far in the course, editing a project from beginning to end.

Marketing Ethics

Marketing involves images, and it's easy to lose sight of the truth. In the final lesson of the course, you'll go over some important considerations that marketing professionals need to think about.

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites to take this course.