Teaching techniques: teaching professionals to write better

The author outlines her approach to teaching professionals how to improve their writing. She describes some of the barriers that make it difficult to teach adults writing techniques and then explains her strategy for overcoming these barriers. The key is to get course participants to work on their own writing samples. Then they cannot avoid the truth-their writing can be improved. The last section of the paper sets out the three themes that the author promotes in her “reader-based” approach to clear and effective writing: (1) think of your readers; (2) write for your readers; and (3) ask a sample of readers to comment on your draft text