Instructional Materials

Our instructional materials are a distinctive feature of Spence & Company workshops in effective business and technical writing.

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 writing that teaches a unique approach to organizing ideas and writing any type of business correspondence. The approach is both extremely explicit and extremely flexible. Once the principles of effective writing are grasped, organizing a memo becomes a relatively simple matter of completing the Worksheet for Organizing Ideas. The completed worksheet creates a detailed plan for drafting the correspondence.

Once participants are familiar with the Worksheet, they can compose a clear, convincing, and well-organized memo in approximately 20 minutes. The same techniques enable people who have taken our workshop to prepare longer memos, letters, and reports with comparable savings in time.

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 correspondence. In addition, the book provides models for the most common types of business writing, from e-mails 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 business writing. It presents all the principles one needs to effectively organize ideas and edit any piece of writing.

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 writing.