 Written communications seminars are a waste of money...
They just don't work.
At significant overall cost, you send your staff off to a two-day Grammar and Usage or Business Writing seminar at which they are bombarded with hundreds of facts, only to return to work exhausted but, ultimately, none the wiser.
 On the positive side, some will have learned to avoid the odd trap (like confusing its with it's), but your inefficient and ineffective communicators won't have suddenly changed their stripes, which is precisely what you wanted.
And just to illustrate the futility of your investment, their seminar ringbinders have already been filed away next to their other forgotten seminar ringbinders.
The cold reality we all face is that if more than 14,000 hours at school hasn't taught us how to write "correctly", another twelve hours at a grammar seminar is unlikely to miraculously fill the void.
And yet, what is the alternative?
A written communications seminar like no other — and that's a promise
Someone once told me that the one thing fish know least about is water. Of course it's not true but it reminds me of a human condition that, remarkably, is undeniably true.
Despite the fact that humans spend more time communicating than doing anything else, if I asked a hundred people to define the purpose of communication I would get close to a hundred different answers.
 And yet if I asked those same hundred people to define the purposes of eating, sleeping, driving, going to work, playing sport, or any one of a hundred less important and less common activities, I have no doubt the responses would be significantly less diverse.
In other words, when it comes to the one activity that has a greater effect on our lives than any other, we don't know precisely why we do what we do.
And how does this affect us? Well, how successful do you think even the most talented soccer players in the world would be if they didn't know that the purpose of the game was to score goals?
To achieve anything you first need a goal. Without one you simply cannot judge for yourself whether you are getting nearer to the goal, or farther from it. You are stuck.
 And stuck is what I think we all are when it comes to communication; not because of some unfixable flaw in our programming, but simply because, just like the fabled fish, we have forgotten to think about our water. Communication is so natural to us that we haven't realized we need to learn its purpose in order to properly utilize our innate aptitude for it.
So the Nakedgrammar seminar is different because, firstly and most importantly, it teaches us to define the overall purpose of communication, as well as the purpose of any particular act of communication that we perform. Thus equipped, you will be surprised at just how capable we all are at modifying the way we write. With just a little fine-tuning of our considerable linguistic knowledge, we are suddenly able to communicate more efficiently and effectively than we have ever done before.
And as for those redundant seminar ringbinders, if the Nakedgrammar seminar guidebook remains unutilized after the seminar, I'll eat my hat (and refund your money).
Simon Hertnon
Author and presenter of Nakedgrammar
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| Nakedize Limited |
Auckland | Wellington
PO Box 2329 Wellington
New Zealand
info[at]nakedize.com |
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