Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School
with the Georgetown University Alumni Association
Join us for a live, interactive 1-hour webinar on Tuesday, March 10, at 12pm EST.
In this webinar, we’ll teach you to identify specific writing practices that you’re taught as a student that will no longer serve you as a professional, along with tangible guidance for what to do instead.
“Casey’s workshops not only contain good information and ideas – they’re actually fun. She helped facilitate great discussions among our team members about how to make our writing pop.”
— Ryan H, Executive Director
We’re Grace and Casey, writing professors turned corporate writing consultants. (And we met working in the writing center as graduate students at Georgetown!)
What makes great writing in school isn’t what makes great writing at work.
The way you learned to write in school can jeopardize your effectiveness in your job and may frustrate colleagues and partners who have to read your emails, decks, memos, and reports.
In school, you were rewarded for things like winding up to a big takeaway, adding in doubles and triples in search of specificity and nuance, and sprinkling in SAT words.
Your professors needed you to “show your work” and prove you did the research. They were assessing whether or not you properly learned the material.
At work, clarity, brevity, and simplicity are essential when your readers are overwhelmed and engaging in task-oriented reading.
Your real-world reader doesn’t need you to show your work or prove your intelligence. They need you to tell them what they should know and why they should care.
“This writing workshop was fantastic! ... I’m a technical writer and have been for many years, so I’m pretty sensitive to writing training sessions and what works well and what doesn’t. These sessions taught by Grace were truly stellar!”
— Capital One workshop participant
In this webinar, you will learn to:
Differentiate the metrics for effective academic writing vs. workplace writing
Identify and revise 5 unhelpful holdovers from academic writing
Replace old assumptions and strategies with research-backed tactics for clear, concise content that busy people will actually read
The writing habits that made you successful in school will get you into trouble in the workplace. You need a new toolkit.
