Our online courses are perfect for organisations and individuals, and easy to access wherever you are in the world.
Our courses are short, effective, and fun. Use them to help you write clearly and understand more about plain language. Further your professional development and apply your new skills straight away to boost your career.
If you’ve attended one of our in-person writing workshops, our online courses will complement and reinforce what you learnt there.
The Write Plain Language Standard
This course is a free introduction to a powerful writing, editing, and collaboration tool that can transform how you and your teammates work: The Write Plain Language Standard.
The Standard is a set of ten elements that tell you whether or not a document will work for its readers. Each lesson in this course covers one element, and contains a video presented by one of our experts, lesson content, and a quiz.
The Standard comes with a Creative Commons licence, so you and your teammates can download and adapt the Standard to suit your circumstances.
You can complete the lessons one after the other, dip into the aspects that interest you, and even use the course as an ongoing reference for your work.
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Plain Language Foundations — An introduction to plain language for busy professionals
How much of your working life involves writing? If it’s more than 5 percent of your time, we guarantee this course will make you better at your job.
This course will help you convey ideas and spark action at work faster — and with greater clarity.
Over 2–3 hours at your own pace, you’ll complete nine concise and enlightening lessons that each contain a video with one of our experts, lesson content, activities, and quizzes.
By the end, you’ll know the secrets to effective writing at work, and be armed with a set of deceptively simple principles for planning, structuring, and writing any document. You’ll also have new tools, such as a writing Standard and a writing process, to refer to daily.
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Tone Matters — A short course for people who want more influence
This course takes you on a personal adventure into the often subtle but always-present power of tone in writing at work.
Think about the emails you’ve received recently. Did you feel that the people emailing you understood you, respected your time, and gave you what you needed? Did that make you more likely to respond in kind?
If so, you’ve observed the power of tone in writing. If not, you know the consequences of the wrong tone — and this course will show you how to avoid those consequences.
This course contains five punchy and interesting lessons, videos with an expert, a downloadable workbook, and fun and concise quizzes. Within 2 hours, you’ll know what tone is, why it’s important, and how you can use tone to have more influence.
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Get the Small Things Right — How to use the right verbs, articles, and tenses
Sometimes the smallest things can have the biggest effect on how your readers perceive you.
Do you ever think to yourself, ‘This sentence just doesn’t sound right, but I can’t figure out what it is?’ This course will help you solve three tricky aspects of the English language that can trip up native English writers as well as people with English as a second language: verbs, articles, and tenses.
This course contains eleven lessons presented over three modules, and is packed with useful advice, videos from one of our experts, lesson content, and plenty of quizzes to test yourself along the way.
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Storytelling at Work — How to use stories at work to promote your ideas
Do you find it difficult to get enthusiasm and agreement from others about your ideas? Do people tell you that your work writing needs to ‘tell more of a story’, but you don’t really know what that means?
This course demystifies the concept of ‘storytelling’ and shows you why stories are your secret weapon for making people care.
Over six concise and powerful lessons, you’ll learn from one of our experts what storytelling is, why it works, and how to use story archetypes to make people fall in love with your ideas. You’ll complete focused activities to create your own story for work, and discover how to adapt your story for reports, meetings, and presentations.
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Escape the Feedback Trap — How to give useful feedback on writing at work
We’ve all been asked to give feedback on writing at work. Sometimes we’re clear on what’s expected. Other times, we’re left to guess what kind of feedback would be most useful. Sometimes we’re confident about what we’re suggesting. And other times, we’re just not sure if we’re actually improving anything.
Good writing is good teamwork, and how your organisation handles feedback can affect how successful its writing is.
This course will help you make sure the feedback you give on writing is clear, concise, and useful. It will help you avoid common mistakes, such as not getting a clear brief, editing rather than commenting, spending much longer than you need to, and harming your relationships with writers.
You’ll complete six lessons, each containing a video from an expert, examples, stories, advice, and quiz content. You’ll be empowered to save time, be useful, and ultimately, collaborate on better documents.
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