Meet Margaret House…
Margaret is the owner of Bounce Fitness, established in 2001. Its head office is in Cairns with centres in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. It plans to open another centre in Perth in the next two years. It was created for the sole purpose of providing training services but now offers life coaching, remedial massage, and other health services. Her role often requires her to write complex documents to communicate a wide range of information to staff and clients.
Margaret's duties include:
- determining her audience, the type of document best suited to convey the message, and the format of the document
- drafting and producing a professional document that communicates information and data according to organisational policies and procedures
- conducting a detailed review and proofreading process to ensure the final document is error-free.
In this module, you will learn the skills and knowledge that enable Margaret to perform her role concerning documentation, namely how and when to:
- plan complex documents
- draft complex documents
- finalise complex documents.
There will be opportunities to develop your knowledge and writing skills throughout the module, so you are ready for your assessment, including looking at the Bounce Fitness Style Guide.
Let us begin by asking Margaret the following three questions.
Margaret responds:
It is a mix of communication items to clients and staff. Client documents tend to have an external focus on providing information and promoting the business. For example, promotions, special offers, changes to opening times, or information on new regulations or requirements. Staff documents are generally internal and may include new policies and procedures, emails. business letters, reports and meeting agendas and minutes. We also develop templates for fitness records and application forms and often use PowerPoint for training sessions. We also write more complex documents such as financial or business plans regularly.
When writing a document, we need to consider the document's audience, purpose, and requirements. To do this, we use listening and questioning skills to seek additional information or confirm the information is correct and appropriate. This practice takes practice and time but is well worth it.
Margaret responds:
Yes, I was part of the committee that helped develop the Bounce Fitness Style Guide. Before we implemented the style guide, Bounce Fitness did not have transparent processes regarding business document communication. We had a corporate logo and letterhead, and that was about it. The style guide ensures consistency and a professional look and feel. Now we have a style guide that provides us with directions on a wide range of tasks including how to format documents (including the types of fonts to avoid), how to use templates and reference correctly. The guide also provides general guidance for punctuation and grammar and file naming conventions. I think using the style guide has improved the standard of our writing and made us much more efficient. Overall, the staff have been quite receptive to the style guide. I often get people approaching me and asking questions about using it to help improve their documents.
Margaret responds:
Proofreading is extremely important. Conveying a concise, grammatically correct, and error-free document is key to professional communication. Errors such as the difference between there, their, and they're or to, too, and two, or its and it's are common mistakes that I see in business documentation. It is one of my main bugbears, and I am guilty of sending documentation back to the author if I find errors. The other issue is ensuring the overall message is communicated as clearly as possible. Some people do not like to read lengthy documents; therefore, concise wording is vital. Some tactics I use include writing clear subject headings in emails, using dot point lists, writing succinct paragraphs and carefully label images, diagrams and graphs.
A couple of other tips I have learnt along the way include using having a cover sheet with the name of the document, audience, author, and when it was created, writing an executive summary for each document and creating a table of contents and indexes for large documents. These simple but effective techniques also make the job of proofing a document much easier.
Now we have met Margaret and discussed aspects of her role at Bounce Fitness, let us dive into the learning!
