
Course Content
Set goals.
Choose strategies based on the goals and readers.
Prepare notes for your email, memo, letter, or report
Use special organizational patterns for some messages.
Write a clear, complete introduction.
For emails, letters, and memos, write a cordial beginning or buffer.
State the contents.
For reports, state conclusions and recommendations in the introduction.
Check each block for focus.
Check each block for completeness.
Use headings to open blocks.
Create lists.
For reports, write clear, complete, relevant explanations.
Write concisely.
Write clear, simple, active-voice sentences.
For reports, write clearly and simply for non-technical readers.
Use words the reader will understand.
Proofread.
Format the email to be readable.
You will send writing samples to your instructor. Your instructor will read each sample thoroughly, identify skills you need to learn, list the sentences with problems in each area with corrections showing how they should have been written, assign readings from the grammar textbook, answer any questions you have about the skill, have you practice the skill, and give you an online quiz containing sentences from your original writing sample that you must correct in ten minutes to be sure you have learned the skills. You will go through four cycles of this work on your writing skills. You have unlimited access to the instructor in the course.
You may purchase the grammar textbook we use from a bookseller such as Amazon.com. However, the textbook is not required for the course. You will use online training materials to learn the skills.
Course Time
You will go through the course at your own pace, so you could complete it within a few weeks. However, you have up to four months to complete each course, giving you a total of eight months, so you can fit the study time into your schedule. All lessons must be finished within the eight-month period.
Course Content
In the Individualized Writing for Nonnative Speakers of English course, you will send writing samples to your instructor. Your instructor will read each sample thoroughly, identify skills you need to learn, list the sentences with problems in each area with corrections showing how they should have been written, assign readings from the grammar textbook, answer any questions you have about the skill, have you practice the skill, and give you an online quiz containing sentences from your original writing sample that you must correct in ten minutes to be sure you have learned the skills. You have unlimited access to the instructor in the course.
Your instructor will look for issues in any of the following areas and teach you the skills you need:
• Abbreviations • Adverbs • Affect - Effect • Apostrophes to Show Possession • Articles • Bolding • Capitalization • Colocations • Colloquialisms • Colons • Commas and Periods with Quotation Marks • Comma Overuse • Commas in a Series • Commas with "However," "Therefore," "Thus" • Commas with Coordinate Adjectives • Commas with Coordinating Conjunctions • Commas with Dates, States, Addresses, and Numbers • Commas with Introductory Elements • Commas with Nonrestrictive Appositives • Commas with Nonrestrictive Elements • Commas with Parenthetical Elements • Commonly Confused Word Pairs • Conciseness • Consistency • Contractions • Dangling and Misplaced Modifiers • Ellipses • Errors Unique to My Writing • Formatting • Fragment Sentences • Gerunds, Infinitives, and Participles • Hyphens and Dashes • Hyphens with Compound Adjectives • Hyphens with Numbers • Hyphens with Prefixes and Compound Words • Idioms and Word Usage • Inversions • Lists • Modal Auxiliary Verbs • Mood Shift • Number (Singular or Plural) • Numbers Format • Omitting Space or Inserting Too Much Space • Parallelism in Lists and Sentences • Parentheses • Passive Voice • Periods • Plurals • Prepositions • Pronoun Reference • Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement • Pronouns • Proofreading • Questions • Quotation Marks • Run-on Sentences • Run-ons Using "Therefore," "However" • Semicolons • Simple Sentence Structures • Simple Vocabulary • Slashes • Spelling • Subject/Verb Agreement • Tense Endings • Tense Shifts • Tense • "There," "Their," and "They're," • Using Case Correctly • Using Key Words • "Whom," "That," and "Which" • Word Choice • Word Omitted • Word Unnecessary • Wordiness • Wording Problems