ESL Writer’s Workshop
This two-day course is tailored to writers of English as a second language (ESL), working in a business or technical environment. It addresses specialized ESL topics in language skills such as verb tense and mood, articles, idiomatic constructions, and critical differences between spoken and written expressions.
To ensure the practical application of the course, we strongly encourage participants to bring samples of their writing to the class for use in discussions and practice sessions. With the instant feedback from the instructor, participants can thus recognize and understand the course concepts in the real-life circumstances of their own documents.
We frequently run this course as a public session. Check the current public schedules in Ottawa and Toronto.
Two companion courses supplement your language skills: The Plain Language Workshop, which provides an overview of effective style through the principles of plain language, and The Grammar Refresher, a review of the grammar rules related to workplace writing.
Who Should Attend
Writers for whom English is a second language.
Course Topics
In this two-day workshop, you will strengthen your command of written English in the workplace, including the following topics:
- the parts of speech and the mechanics of sentence structure
- punctuation: colon, semi-colon, comma
- possessives
- use of pronouns
- avoiding of sentence fragments and comma splices
- subject/verb agreement
- English tenses
- the use of articles (a, an, the)
- prepositions used in phrases and with certain verbs
- English idioms (phrases that don’t translate directly)
- the effective use of adjectives and adverbs
- current vs obsolete phrases