Writing Briefing Notes

This one-day course teaches participants how to write effective briefing notes for use in corporations or government agencies. Participants will learn how to write concise and comprehensive documents that summarize complex source materials.

If your organization uses specific templates or models for briefing notes, we can incorporate those into our standard instructional materials.

Participants are also encouraged to bring sample documents to class for review and critique.

This seminar is designed for executive assistants, project leaders, managers, and anyone responsible for writing issue, action, or status summarizations that provide briefings.

Introduction

• What is a briefing?
• How to write a briefing

Briefing Notes Preparation

• Preparation checklist
• Information and idea gathering checklist
• Briefing organization checklist
• Briefing arrangements checklist
• Briefing presentation checklist

The Body

• What is your thesis?
• Organizational Techniques for Different Types of Briefings
  • Informative briefing
  • Persuasive briefing
  • Arousing briefing
  • Entertaining briefing
• Supporting statements
• Supporting claims
• Transition statements
  • Examples of transition statements
  • Examples of transition words

The Introduction

• Five ways to begin a briefing
• Introduction checklist
• Opening statement

The Conclusion

• Conclusion checklist

Practicing your Briefing

• Eight tips
• Practicing checklist

Special Briefings

• Impromptu briefings checklist
• Award acceptance checklist

Improving all of your Briefings

• Nine ways to improve clarity in your briefing
• Fifteen tips to add sparkle to any briefing
• Nine rhetorical techniques for more memorable and persuasive briefings

Using Humor

• Eight ways to use humor in briefings
• Six rules on using humor in briefings
• Five great tricks for using humor

Internet Resources for Writers

Use the following resources to assist you in writing briefing notes:

Dictionaries

• www.oed.com

  The online version of the seminal dictionary of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary

• dictionary.reference.com/translate/text.html

  Excellent and fast translation dictionary

• nhd.heinle.com

  Contains over 40,000 entries and is based on the best selling Newbury House Dictionary of American English; provides simple and clear definitions, and a wealth of sample sentences, idioms, and a wide array of cultural facts and figures

Dictionary and Thesaurus Combinations

• www.m-w.com/home.htm

  Web site by Merriam-Webster that features a dictionary and thesaurus

• www.wordsmyth.net

  American English dictionary and thesaurus contains 50,000 headwords, and very precisely defined and hyperlinked synonyms

• www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn

  An online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory; English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept

References and Writing Help

• www.bartleby.com/141/index.html

  William Strunk's 1918 classic, The Elements of Style

• webster.commnet.edu/HP/pages/darling/grammar.htm

  Contains scores of digital handouts on grammar and English usage, over 170 computer-graded quizzes, recommendations on writing - from basic problems in subject-verb agreement and the use of articles to exercises in parallel structures and help with argumentative essays, and a way to submit questions about grammar and writing

• www.theslot.com

  A newspaper editor's thorough and opinionated look at grammar and style questions.

Research

• www.google.com

  The best starting place for Internet research

• www.ceoexpress.com

  A great collection of resources for all types of business research

Software

• www.angelfire.com/ny/writesoftware

  Links to writing software in every imaginable category