Professional Development

Price includes refreshments, lunch and course materials.

Level: Foundation

Key issues:

Every day, organisations produce copy for websites, mailing letters, advertisements, brochures and leaflets that will be read by a range of stakeholders. Often the copy is for internal consumption by colleagues, managers and staff. There is considerable embarrassment if the copy contains literal errors and in some cases there can be financial consequences. Your organisation seeks to promote its reputation every day through the copy that it presents. This course helps you to identify and correct sub-standard copy.

The purpose of this course:

This course is designed to improve the standard of proofreading in your organisation and ensure that the copy you present to colleagues, customers and other stakeholders is correct. Much of the copy produced by organisations is never read because it is too wordy or fails to keep the reader interested. The course will help you to reduce errors and ensure that the copy produced by your organisation is more readable.

Who this course is for:

Everyone in your organisation has to ensure that copy errors are avoided, so this course is suitable for people at all levels, even senior management. Everyone has responsibility for maintaining the organisation’s reputation by making sure that copy is correct before it is distributed. The training is particularly relevant to people who are responsible for checking copy as part of their day-to-day role.

Benefits for your organisation:

Your organisation will benefit from this course because it will lead to a reduction in copy errors and will result in better quality copy. It will help the organisation to avoid embarrassing situations caused by ambiguous or incorrect copy and will help to avoid the cost of reprinting flawed promotional materials.

Benefits for you as an individual:

By attending this course you will improve your ability to identify and correct copy errors. You should also learn how to reconstruct copy so that it is grammatically correct and easier for the reader to understand. Using the knowledge gained from the course, you can also convince the person who writes the copy to accept the necessary corrections.

You will learn how to:

• Improve the quality of copy
• Recognise and remove tautology
• Avoid clichés
• Use comparatives and superlatives correctly
• Ensure correct punctuation
• Restructure excessively wordy copy
• Read copy to detect errors
• Understand grammar and the construction of sentences
• Turn passive copy into active copy
• Use hyphens, apostrophes and quotation marks correctly
• Use punctuation for emphasis and ease of reading
• Identify Americanisation
• Avoid circumlocution

Course content:

• Proofreading and copy exercises
• Finding errors in copy
• Recognising the most common errors
• How to create proofreading standards for the writer
• Recognising and removing ambiguity in copy
• Recognising and removing ‘witter’ copy
• The fundamentals of grammar
• How to reconstruct unreadable or flawed copy
• Proofreading symbols and how they are used
• Preventing tautology
• Avoiding clichés
• Hints and tips for better proofreading

Pre and post learning support:

Delegates will be referred to sources of support at the end of the course.

To take away from the course:

At the end of the course, delegates will have guidelines that they can apply immediately to their work.

Professional Standards

All of our marketing courses are based on CIM's Professional Marketing Standards, ensuring that marketers at all levels of seniority gain the practical skills that employers require to improve business performance. Review our Professional Marketing Standards framework