Workshop 2: Stephen Johnston

The impossible blog: How to write a readable blog from unreadable material

Summary: This fun workshop trains participants to (ghost)write short, clear, and easy-to-understand blogs from

technical or highly detailed and dry source material.

Purpose: Professional copywriters are often asked to write a blog for a company, only to be faced with virtually unreadable, complex source material. “Make it sexy!” they say.

Hmmm.

This hands-on workshop trains participants to take technical, specialized,  and/or complicated source material and turn it into a readable, interesting blog for the general public. With a fun mix of theory and exercises, participants will learn how to:

  • Determine the target readers
  • Distill key information
  • Create a hook and a story to interest readers
  • Re-write it while removing technical terms
  • Write interesting headings to grab the readers’ attention
  • Create short social media descriptions for Twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, etc.

It will help any seasoned or budding writers (or translators/editors who would like to become a writer) to gain confidence and skill in writing company blogs – a great addition to any CV.

 


About the facilitator

Stephen JohnstonStephen Johnston is a professional trainer, copywriter and journalist who works with multi-national companies on projects such as websites, internal and external communication, white papers, marketing material, brochures, corporate journalism, and speechwriting... and blogs!

Much of this work involves specifically targeting different readership groups. Stephen also upgrades previously written texts and/or provides one tone-of-voice for texts with multiple authors to increase their impact and professionalism. He also conducts workshops and training sessions to improve the quality of business writing and presenting.

To register for this pre-conference workshop click here.