Pre-Course Needs Assessment: Manager

Your organization is considering several WordTask writing courses. To assist in the determination of a specific course or set of courses, please use the form below to let us know the needs and interests your group has for training in writing skills.

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. We will use your feedback in our discussions with your organization to tailor our training services to your group’s needs and to the documents your employees routinely write.

Instructions

  1. Fill in the biographical data in “Information about you & your group”.
  2. Answer the nine questions that follow by inserting text in the boxes provided. Text is required in all of the boxes; please enter NA in any box for which you do not wish to add a comment.
  3. Select the Send button to send the information to us or the Clear button to erase your entries and start again.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to provide us with this information. Your feedback will guarantee that the course addresses your team’s specific writing interests.

Information about you & your group

Name (req’d):
Company/Organization:
Job title/function:
Email address (req’d):

Total number of people in your group who need writing training
Number of people doing basic business writing (correspondence, short reports, minutes, etc.)
Number of people doing strategic/persuasive business writing (analysis documents, proposals, evaluation documents, etc.)
Number of technical specialists doing technical documentation
Number of technical writers who need training

Other types of writing (Please specify and estimate number of participants.)

Writing in your group

1. What are the job functions of your staff?

2. What percentage of their job time do they spend writing? Include in this percentage the time they spend writing emails of several paragraphs or longer.


3. What kind of documents are they responsible for? For what purpose do they write these documents?

4. Do they write documents that are placed on the Web? If so, what types of documents specifically do they write for the Web?

5. What do they currently do to plan for writing? Is it successful? List any problems that arise in their planning process.

6. Describe their collective writing process from start to finish.

7. Do they use the computer as a writing tool? If so, for what parts of the writing process? Is the source material available on line, allowing them to copy and paste from other documents, or do they have to transcribe information manually from source information?

Improvement areas

8. What comments or complaints do their readers–such as managers, supervisors, or customers–make about their writing? Include in detail any issues of style, grammar, and the organization of their ideas.

9. Irrespective of what their readers say about their writing, what do YOU want them to improve on by taking a writing course?


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