Past Webinars
Technical Communication Lecture Series
Style Guides for Team Efficiency – July 14, 2021
Well-coordinated teams where all the players know their roles and the rules of play are the most collegial and successful teams. That’s true in sport, life, and in business. An important coordination tool used by publishing teams is a style guide. In this webinar, we discuss this tool, what it can do for your team’s success, time management, and cohesiveness, and how to build one of your own.
Project-based Résumés for Proposals – August 11, 2021
A curriculum vitae, or CV, contains a complete history of your qualifications, skills, accolades and professional experiences. Companies preparing proposals commonly need to extract a short résumé of relevant skills and experiences from employee CVs. This webinar will cover approaches to produce focused, project-based résumés.
Writing Under Tight Timelines – June 9, 2021
When faced with a tight timeline, do you get started, or freeze in a panic and somehow pull it together at the last minute? This webinar offers strategies to achieve what you have to do, and maximize quality, when you have what seems to be too little time.
Concise Verbal Communication – May 12, 2021
How do you learn to speak less and get the same message across? Most of us know that letting the other person speak more will encourage better relations, but sometimes we talk excessively even when we do not mean to. In this webinar we look at strategies to use fewer words to communicate better.
Critical Peer Review – April 14, 2021
Professional consultants have long realized that getting a peer to read and review their work before sending it out results in a much better product, but the process can be painful. This webinar addresses some of the common issues with revising peer work, and offers solutions to streamline the process.
Professional E-mail Practice – March 10, 2021
“I don’t know why clients/colleagues don’t return my e-mails,” or “People don’t respond properly with all the answers I asked for,” are common refrains for some professionals. This webinar encapsulates best practices for communications, specialized to the context of e-mails, to ensure you get better results from your business (and personal!) correspondence.
Concise Writing Strategies – February 10, 2021
Mark Twain famously said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Whether you are writing to clients or colleagues, taking the time to write more concisely can result in more effective communications, better relationships, and increased profits. This webinar presents strategies for trimming your writing to produce more elegant, pleasing communications.
Persuasive Writing – January 13, 2021
The pen is mightier than the sword to win you friends and clients… but wielded incorrectly, the way you put words on the page can damage your relationships and your opportunities. This webinar gives strategies to explain your perspective in a way that will entice others to want to hear more, and maybe even fund important projects.
Readability Strategies for Technical Writing – December 9, 2020
From marketing to safety documentation and complex reports, the science of readability can help deliver messages more effectively to readers, improve client relations and enhance profitability.
This webinar presents strategies for making technical English easier to read, including advice about sentence structure, word choice, font selection, page formatting and more. Attendees will leave the session with a range of new strategies in their professional toolkit.
Presenter
Christa Bedwin
B.Ed., B.S.c., Senior Technical Editor
Christa is a Senior Technical Editor, who has 20 years’ experience coaching scientific and engineering writers, and editing for industry, government, academia, and educational and trade publishers, with specialties in engineering and the environment. She has taught technical writing to professional engineers and scientists in Canada and internationally; has published three textbooks about writing for scientific reporting consultants; and among other projects has contributed chapters to Editors Canada’s two most recent publications, Editing Canadian English and its companion volume, Editorial Niches.