Advance Your Writing in Government - Review

As a policy official, my role can involve the writing of reports to internal and external groups. I originally come from a technical background therefore writing large reports is an area where I needed to develop my skills.

I discovered aPolitical via a colleague and immediately identified the Advance Your Writing in Government course as a key development opportunity. I was keen to improve the readability of documents and structure them in a professional manner.

The course is split into 5 sections covering areas such as plain language, punctuation, active/passive voice, purpose, audience, structure etc. The course took me approx. 4 weeks to complete overall, doing around 2 hrs per week.

The material is well structured with examples for you put each section into practice. This comes in the form of a chunk of text, and you are tasked with structuring it in accordance with the recommended method. This style is maintained throughout the course to help you develop your skills. It is a very beneficial method and helps to reinforce the learning.

The course also contains an Impact Plan. This has details on the course sections as well as space to add additional notes as part of your learning. If you make good use of this, you can use it in the future as an offline document covering all of the sections.

The sections that I found most beneficial were the Use Plain Text and Active Voice. The one I struggled with the most was the Paramedic Method which took longer to complete as I needed to repeat sections in order to fully understand it. The material is such that you can easily do this.

Would I recommend the material...definitely and especially if you write reports or want written material to be well structured and understandable. I also think that its material that you may need to go back to periodically as a refresher - especially if like me, you are not working on reports on a daily/weekly basis.