Description
The world is overloaded with information, making it essential to communicate clearly and concisely and to convey messages effectively. Readers need to understand quickly the key points and structure of any piece of writing, from short emails to the most formal reports.
This course focuses on strategies for making English writing and editing more direct, cohesive, and engaging. It is intended for people with a solid grounding in English but whose work requires that they strengthen their skills in written communication.
The focus of the workshop is on efficient writing of strategic macro-fiscal documents, especially for the intermediate and final authors of EFP/PEP reports. (Potential candidates for EU membership report each year to the European Commission on their Economic and Fiscal Programme [EFP]; candidate countries report on their Pre-Accession Economic Programme [PEP].) Assessments of past reports stressed the importance of strengthening the story line between different chapters, and better addressing inconsistencies caused, for example, when integrating inputs of different stakeholders into the main document; such integration often results in an unbalanced mix of too much detail on less important aspects and too little emphasis on more important aspects.
The following topics will be covered during this 3-day course:
- Establishing clarity
- Outlining and organizing the text
- Highlighting key messages
- Guiding the reader through sentences and paragraphs
- Editing yourself and others
- Targeting your audience
- Avoiding bureaucratic language
- Editorial style and consistency
- Formatting for the reader
How you will benefit
The workshop focuses on principles for making writing more effective, clear, and concise, and it assumes that participants are empowered to apply these principles directly to materials that they write and edit.
Through a combination of brief lectures, small group work, and plenary discussions participants will learn about ways to develop and strengthen the content and processes for their most important documents. All exercises focus on examples drawn from the participants’ own writing and editing.
The practical knowledge gained during the workshop can be applied to everyday work immediately.
Who should attend
The seminar is designed primarily for officials in ministries of finance and other coordinating institutions, who are involved in preparing the annual budget and strategic macro-fiscal documents (e.g., the intermediate and final authors of EFP/PEP reports). Officials working in line ministries (and other budget users) who draft the inputs for such documents (e.g., program managers, planning and financing experts, and heads of relevant departments responding to ministry of finance requests) are also kindly invited to attend the workshop.
Your contributions
To provide the most useful basis for group exercises, participants are asked to submit in advance one or more recent examples of their writing or editing (each applicant needs to send a one-page statement of interest at the time of application) of the EFP/PEP reports. The submission of participants’ written examples prior to the workshop is required for the selection of candidates to the workshop. The examples are to be sent to Matija Čarman (matija.carman@cef-see.org).
The structure of the course (explanation-example-practical example) makes the workshop highly participatory, engaging people in listening, editing and writing. Participants are expected to be active in discussions and exercises throughout the three days.
The combination of group exercises and real-life examples of participants’ writing and editing enables participants to learn also from others’ experience.
