Are your documents effective? Do they communicate clearly to their audience? Most organisations produce a wide range of documents – leaflets, reports, web pages, briefing papers, brochures, mailshots, e-mailshots or other material.

It’s vital for your reputation that these documents meet the needs of your readership, say what you want them to say, are produced to time and budget, and are free from error.

This fast-paced two-day course will help you develop the necessary skills to edit and manage the production of all kinds of document.

By the end of it, you’ll:

• understand the editing and publishing processes
• be able to apply basic editing techniques
• have the skills to produce documents that are fit for purpose
• know how to identify and avoid common editing pitfalls
• save time, money and mistakes.

The course is firmly grounded in the needs of businesses of all kinds – large corporations, SMEs, government organisations, charities and academic institutions. The content and practical examples are all to the point and from a business environment.

Programme

Day one

• The publishing process
  • Common aims, common principles
  • Who does what, when, and why
  • Planning the publication: allocating pages, establishing extent
  • Briefing and commissioning writers
• Editing in the publishing process
  • Why texts need editing; what an editor does
  • Two main types of editing: structure and copy
  • Factors influencing the editor’s decisions
  • The need for accuracy, consistency, standardisation
  • House styles, for and against

Day two

• More intensive editorial intervention
  • The main problems posed by poorly written texts
  • Thinking visually: how the reader navigates text
  • Changing level: adapting material for different readerships
  • How to cut text
• Design in the publishing process
  • The design function
  • What a designer needs to know
• Proofreading in the publishing process
  • The proofing process: different types and stages, escalating costs!
  • The proofreading function: different techniques and things to look out for
  • The final stages
• Briefing and signing off
  • Briefing external writers
  • Briefing the internal team
  • The handover process and signing off

Online training
This course includes online training and support.

Who will benefit from this course?
Staff with an editorial or publications role in companies, SMEs, government departments, charities, and other business organisations; people with little or no formal training in publishing and whose main job may not necessarily be editorial.

Your tutor
After a spell in teaching and education research, Andrew Steeds worked as a publisher in three of the major UK educational publishing companies before going freelance in 1992. He now runs Simply Put, a company that offers writing, project management and consultancy to organisations that want to communicate more effectively with the full range of their readers.

We also offer Proofreading for Non-Publishers.

Note that most of our open courses can also be run as in company events.

Send details of this course to a colleague.

Dates: 6-7 October 2008

Price: £689+VAT (a number of discounts are available).

Venue: The Publishing Training Centre in Wandsworth, London (see a map and a list of local hotels).

Make a provisional booking on Editing Skills for Non-Publishers