A company’s newsletter is the voice of the organisation. If you are involved in producing a newsletter, you can increase your readability by good writing, attractive visuals, interesting content, and design that draws and retains the reader. A well-produced newsletter can engage its readership and bond employees to the organisation.

Learning Outcomes:

• Write crisp and clear copy that draws readers to your newsletters
• Edit copy to make your articles more readable
• Guide photographers to take interesting pictures
• Crop pictures to tell their own story
• Guide layout artists to play up important company articles

Course Outline:

• Writing clear intros and news leads
• Adopting the inverted pyramid style used in newspapers
• Honing in on the angle to give routine news a fresh perspective
• Shaping and sequencing articles for easy reading
• Adding quotes and captions to add interest
• Unleashing the power of the verb to make articles come alive
• Knowing how to use tenses, punctuation, diction, sentence length and clauses
• Weeding out ambiguity and clutter
• Selecting the appropriate vocabulary and transition links to make the articles coherent
• Creating effective paragraphs
• Proofreading techniques – tips and techniques
• Engaging the Editor in layout principles
• Focus on type (size, font), column settings (being aware of the desired number of words in a column to aid readability), subheads (placing), captions (format)
• Writing catchy headlines and standfirsts to grab the readers’ attention
• Cropping and composing photographs to maximise impact
• Understanding how design enhances readability

Who Can Benefit?

Writers, editors and communications staff who oversee newsletter production.