A deliberately unstuffy seminar that helps managers, support staff, and technicians rid their written work of grammar and punctuation errors.

The seminar concentrates on giving participants continual practice in working with each of the major punctuation marks and grammar principles, as well as in subordinating ideas within a sentence, using effective transitions, improving spelling, and using proper capitalization and abbreviations.

OBJECTIVES:

• Recognize, practice, and understand the distinct, proper uses of each major punctuation mark, especially commas, hyphens, and apostrophes.
• Know how to recognize and correct the six major grammar errors, including subject-verb disagreement, dangling modifiers, and run-on sentences.
• Gain practice in the ways of subordinating sentences for maximum clarity and impact.
• Know how to use transitions to add ideas, compare and contrast, show sequence, illustrate, and summarize.
• Learn the proper use of contractions, abbreviations, and parallel construction.
• Know how to turn passive sentences into active ones.
• Know the proper use of capitalization, boldface, italics, and indenting.
  
  
  METHODOLOGY:
  
• Using a workshop format, this seminar introduces fun, stimulating exercises to relieve people of their fears about punctuation and grammar.
• Continual testing assures that participants are comfortable applying what they’ve learned.
• All participants are given handout materials that clearly convey the rules of punctuation and grammar, and that use before-and-after examples to make those rules clear.
• Each student receives posters that graphically illustrate nuances of grammar, punctuation, tone, capitalization, and spelling.
• The workshop avoids jargon (participle, nominative case) and emphasizes practical, rather than theoretical, ways that grammar and punctuation add “body language” to writing.

  LENGTH OF PROGRAM: 1 day

  RECOMMENDED NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 12-15