Writing workshops

What a writing workshop is

A writing workshop is one half day, three and a half hours, with up to eight people from your business, spent working on writing they have already done. I ask for six to ten real pieces a fortnight beforehand — service pages, posts, proposals, the newsletter, whatever they actually produce — and the session is built out of those. Nothing invented, no sample text about a fictional bakery.

It is not a course and it is not coaching. A course would run the same material for any room. Coaching would follow the same people for months. This is a single fixed session, delivered once, with one piece of paper to show for it afterwards.

Who this is for

A team that writes adequately and inconsistently. Nobody is bad at it; everybody does it differently, and the differences show up on the website. A workshop is also the right first purchase when you are not sure whether the problem is skill or process, because half a day on real drafts makes that obvious quickly and cheaply.

It is the wrong purchase if you already know the team needs sustained help. Habits do not change in an afternoon. A workshop can show people what to do and give them something to follow, but nothing follows up on it unless something is arranged, and that is what fortnightly coaching is for. If only one person writes, coaching that person beats a room. And if what you actually want is the drafts fixed rather than the people taught, buy copyediting and spend nothing on the afternoon.

What happens in the half day

• An hour on structure. Two of the submitted pieces on screen, rebuilt live. Where the answer goes, what the first two sentences owe the reader, which paragraph is doing no work. This is the part that changes the most for the least effort.
• Forty minutes on sentences. Length, hedging, the passive constructions that hide who did what, and the trade words the team uses without noticing that customers do not.
• A worked exercise on their own material. Everyone takes a piece they wrote and cuts it by a third in twenty minutes. Then we read three of them aloud and compare against the original.
• Half an hour on the rules you already have. If there is a style guide, we test it against the drafts and mark what is being ignored. If there is not, the room writes the first six rules.
• Questions and disagreements. Left until the end deliberately, because by then the arguments are specific rather than theoretical.

What you get

The one-page reference. Written after the session rather than handed out during it, so it contains the rules the room actually agreed, in the room’s own words. It is the checklist the team works from afterwards, and it is deliberately one side of one page, because a forty-page document is not consulted.

The rebuilt pieces. The two or three drafts we worked on live, in their edited state, with the changes tracked so anyone who missed the session can see what was done and why.

A short honest note to whoever paid. Three or four sentences: what this team is already good at, where the writing is losing readers, and whether the problem is skill or the way work moves through the business. Sometimes that note says a workshop was the wrong purchase, and it says so.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Canadian equipment hire company with two branches has five people who write: two branch managers, a sales coordinator, the owner and a part-time marketing contractor. They publish roughly two posts a month and maintain fourteen service pages. The pages open with company history and reach the hire terms in the fourth paragraph, because that is the order the first one was written in and everybody copied it.

The workshop opens with two of those pages rebuilt on screen, and the room sees the same fault in both within ten minutes. The cutting exercise takes a 1,100-word post down to 700 without anyone missing what went. The disagreement that surfaces at the end is whether the hire terms can be published at all, which turns out to be a decision for the owner rather than a writing question, and he makes it in the room. The one-page reference afterwards has seven rules on it. Three months later the two branch managers are still using it, the sales coordinator is not, and the company books fortnightly sessions for that reason.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who writes, what they produce, and what you are hoping changes. If a workshop is the wrong thing I will say so on this call. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The date, the number of seats and what is included, agreed before anything is booked.
3. Material sent in. Six to ten real pieces, at least a fortnight ahead, so the session is built from them rather than from a template.
4. The half day. Three and a half hours with one break, on your premises or on video. Eight people is the ceiling; past that nobody gets their own work looked at.
5. The follow-up. The one-page reference, the rebuilt drafts and the note to you, within three working days.

What it costs

A workshop is quoted after the first call and stated as one fixed figure, because the price depends on the number of people, how much material is sent in, and whether it is delivered in person or on video. It does not map to any of the published monthly bands; the pricing page shows the four standard ways of working so you can see where this sits beside them. The figure is fixed in writing before the date is held, and travel inside the province is included in it.

What happens next

The most common next step is the honest one: a team that liked the afternoon books recurring sessions, because the reference sheet needs somebody checking against it for a while. Some teams instead turn the seven rules into a full set of written standards, which is the durable version of the same thing. Others find the problem was never the writing, and go to a process that fits how they really approve things. None of that is assumed. The half day is a complete piece of work, and plenty of businesses buy it once and buy nothing else.