Insider Secrets For Selling
Every Word You Write!

IMPROVE EMPLOYEE WRITING

Everyone agrees on the problem:

Writing costs a company big bucks. Bad writing costs you even more.

Bad writing sends the wrong message to others about the quality of your organization, its employees and their reliability. Every letter and email sent out communicates an image of your company. Is it the right one?

Bad writing causes inefficiency, wasting time and resources. The lack of clear communication is continually flagged as a significant problem in business, whether it's internal or external communications.

Bad writing forces a business to spend more money than it needs to on communications. What is your company's annual writing investment? Probably more than you think. Try this simple exercise. I've filled in numbers for a medium-size business. The minimum hours of week spent writing (8 hours) is a figure that comes from research conducted by The American Society of Business Communicators.

Acme Meat's Annual Writing Investment

1. Number of employees who write: 50

2. Minimum hours per week they write: times 8

3. Weekly time investment: equals 400 hrs

4. Average hourly wage: times $10

5. Weekly dollar investment: equals $4,000

6. Work weeks per year: times 50

ACME'S ANNUAL WRITING INVESTMENT = $200,000

Two Questions for Acme Meats or any business:
1. Are you getting your money's worth?
2. Would you like to save between 30% to 50% of that money?

What are your options?

The three most common are:

Writing Consultants. They cost about $75 per hour, per employee, for on-site training. Ten employees may cost you $7,500 for a two- or three-day course. Add in travel and meals if your employees go off site. Typically, employees attend a workshop or seminar and receive general instruction and some one-on-one.

Manuals and books. These require a highly-motivated and self-disciplined employee in order to be effective.

Online courses and tutoring. Distance learning via the Internet is increasingly popular. It usually provides cheaper and more extended instruction than consultants do, but lacks immediate, face-to-face interaction.

What are the drawbacks of these options?

Lack of one-on-one. Because writing is a skill, improvement in it is best achieved by performing that skill in the presence of a coach or expert and receiving hands-on guidance. It's difficult to improve a skill merely by talking about it in a group setting or via the Internet.

Lack of follow up. Studies show that, without follow-up, retention of learned material quickly degenerates to 10% in three days, then tapers off gradually until approaching zero.

Lack of context. The litmus test for all instruction is the student's ability to apply knowledge to specific, real-world tasks. The transfer of knowledge from learning models to messy reality can be difficult. It's one thing to talk about wordiness and to complete drills on reducing wordiness, but it's quite another to actually do employ that skill consistently in the context of your own writing.

Lack of accountability. If a company invests in improving its employees' skills, how can the company monitor results over time and determine its ROI?

In short, classroom courses, online courses, and self-teaching manuals can be inefficient, ineffective and wasteful. They often leave the company still looking for a way to improve employee communication that is:

Effective
Measurable
Cost effective
Long term

THE WRITING MACHINE

At Peak Writing, we take that challenge seriously and have devised a unique program to achieve the four goals of effective, measurable, cost-effective and long-term improvement of employee writing skills. We call it "The Writing Machine." Here's how it works:

1. Data Collection. We meet with the employees you specify to introduce our program, to identify their specific writing tasks and to collect samples of their writing.

2. Analysis and Assessment. We examine the writing strengths and weaknesses of each employee. We identify the specific kinds of business writing tasks they perform: letters, memos, reports and releases that range from asking for information, to demanding payment, to announcing a new product.

3. Model Building. We work with each employee to build a model or template for each writing task. We use the employee's own language and ideas. This is where the one-to-one coaching takes place as we work within the context of the individual's own language, skills and needs.

4. GUI Building. Once we have the models built, we incorporate them into our graphical user interface called "The Writing Machine," which becomes part of the employee's word processing program. The employee is able to call up templates and past pieces of writing, to follow on-screen prompts, to click for immediate help at any given place in the manuscript.

5. Proliferation. As each employee uses the Writing Machine, it builds a database of writing templates specific to that individual and company. This database becomes an important and tangible business resource.

6. Monitoring. The Writing Machine works on an individual level and company wide. It produces automated reports on the amount of time spent writing versus the number of words produced by the individual, a group, or the company as a whole.

7. Online Help. In our premium programs, the Writing Machine has a function that allows the employee to email us a writing project for review prior to its being sent, with immediate turn around guaranteed, as well as the ability to ask us specific questions and get immediate answers.

THE PEAK WRITING GUARANTEE

We guarantee a 25% reduction in the time your employees spend writing, or your money back.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

If you're interested in hearing more about "The Writing Machine" program, click below to send us an email or send it directly to: david@peakwriting.com.

Phone: (912) 398-2987
Fax: (702) 926-0806

We look forward to working with you!