Making Your Case

Making Your Case:
writing reports and presentations
- sample programme

Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
• produce well-structured and professionally presented reports that meet a defined aim and

. enhance the company’s image

• produce well-structured presentations
• understand the requirements of the reader and audience
• use clear and concise language
• use technology to save time

Course content

Introduction:

• Course and participants’ objectives
• ‘What image do you want to convey?’

Planning:

• Sequence of activities
• Thinking about the reader/audience and the action you want them to take
• Using transactional analysis to define the tone
• Getting started quickly and painlessly: brainstorming and visual mapping

Structuring reports and presentations:

• Classifying information
• The different parts of a report and ‘what goes where’
• Structures for different reports and presentations, eg investigative, proposal and progress
• Using paragraphs to reflect the stucture
• Opening and closing presentations powerfully

Clear and concise language:

• Using words that are correct, simple and necessary
• Using active verbs
• Understanding and using readability statistics
• Being specific and using positive language
• Using bullet points and ensuring parallelism

Grammar, punctuation and spelling:

• ‘Dangling modifiers’
• The importance of punctuation
• How to improve spelling

Layout and presentation:

• Page layout and typography
• Presenting facts and figures in an interesting and memorable way
• Writing procedures

Revising, evaluating and close:

• Proofreading
• Review of actions from course