Instructional Materials

Our instructional materials are a distinctive feature of Spence & Company workshops on business writing and presentations.

Participants in all our programs receive two books: Write Smart and its supplement, Business Writing: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Write Smart is a detailed guide to business communication that teaches a unique approach to organizing ideas and composing all types of messages. The approach is both explicit and yet flexible. Once the principles of effective communication are grasped, organizing a document or presentation becomes a relatively simple matter of completing the Worksheet for Organizing Ideas. The completed worksheet creates a detailed plan for drafting your communication, which can then be edited by applying nine simple principles for effective sentences and paragraphs.

Workshop participants also receive Business Writing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly that reinforces the principles taught in Write Smart. Business Writing presents more than 100 pages of examples illustrating the principles presented in Write Smart. The examples also show how to convert confused accounts into well-organized and readable documents. In addition, the book provides models for the most common types of business writing, from e-mails and memos to reports, proposals, minutes of meetings, trip reports, cover letters for resumes, and other types of business correspondence.

At the end of each workshop, participants receive The Write Smart Guide, a handy reference tool the size of a business card that summarizes the elements of effective communication. It presents all the principles needed to organize and edit any message.

To read the Preface and Chapter 1 of Write Smart, click here. These selections will give you an overview of the Spence & Company approach to effective communication.