Hi Carly

I would be very surprised if by the end of your course, you havent learned to improve on your written communication as this will be essential for practically all of the modules you will be doing.

So, whilst you may need to tailor your style a little more to what your employer wants, at least this course will give you sufficient opportunity to do further groundwork.

Perhaps if you are sending out general mailers to staff you could ask your manager to proof read it first and make any suggestions for improvement? By doing this a few times you will get a sense of the 'style' that they are after.

Hi Carly and wecome to the forums.

Two books in the CIPD/Kogan Page bookshop are :

How to Write Reports and Proposals
Patrick Forsyth

Improve Your Communication Skills
Alan Barker

I have heard positive comments about the 1-day courses run by Emphasis in this area - http://writing-skills.com/

Hi Carly
First of all, welcome!
The old ones can still be the best - for example
www.ourcivilisation.com/.../

Someone's writing style can be a bit like Marmite, so you first maybe need a considered and objective view about whether or not it really is a problem. Not too many people are blessed with great written fluency, but, up to a point, does it really matter much, provided the main points get across?

There are all manner of report writing etc courses around but most of them will be derived from good old Sir Ernie above.

Learning by doing can help a great deal. You say you've not hit any problems with your CIPD course but maybe another course requiring long and lucid essays etc that get rigorously marked might help.

Also, I think a lot of people pick up literary fluency from wide reading - do you read a lot of books yourself? If not you might like to try some good modern novels such as by Hemingway or Steinbeck or Catcher in the Rye by Salinger or even older stuff such as Moby *** or even older such as Charles Dickens - if you critically take in a lot of good writing, there may well be some osmosis starts!

In reply to David:

(crossed with colleagues' wise words too)

It really depends on what your manager means by it! Can they give you some examples, or edit one of your documents to illustrate what they are wanting to you to do? Was it grammar or style? Style is very subjective, and also variable depending on who you are writing for as the reader.

You can do all the learning in the world but if you don't know what you're aiming at, you can't know where to do with it.

Carly, is you manger talking about style, presentation or something else? Your post seems well constructed and coherent so could it be you just need to adapt to the in-house style of writing.

There is a little bit of my brain which gets confused when I write things down, my written language skills are, at best, quite poor. Writing is a frustrating process for me, which takes me much longer than normal to string together words which make sense. However, I have spent over 25 years in HR, most of it contracting on short term contracts, which is probably a long winded way of saying written skills are important but there is much more to HR than report writing

In reply to Ray:

Thank you Ray, that is really useful :)

In reply to Steven :

Hi Steven. Thank you for your answer! He hasn't given me any specifications, I would say it would fall into the style category and perhaps I do need to adapt to the in-house style of writing. With every email, document or report I write I really reflect what I have written and change to make it grammtically perfect (as it can be) and try to expand my vocabulary. All I can do is continue to try and expand my knowledge. I agree with your last comment, thank you!

Hi Carly

It may only be a small sample, but having read your post I cannot agree with your manager that your written English is "show stopping". We all seem to have understood you with no difficulty.

In HR, we draft documents that go out to the whole organisation so for me the standard to achieve for any piece of writing issued by an HR department is that it should be unambiguous and clear. We aren't trying to compose elegant prose; we need the night shift or a lone worker at the other end of the country to understand what to do by reading something we have circulated when we aren't there in person to explain it to them. If we can't do that, that would be show-stopping.

If, however, you want to dip into a book or two for your own peace of mind, then here are some you might find of interest:

Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
The Economist Style Guide
Usage and Abusage: A Style Guide to Good English by Eric Partridge

Lynne Truss's book was a best seller read for its entertainment value, so if you haven't already read it, that might be the one to try first.

I am no expert (and frequent readers will have noticed more than one or two grammatical and typing errors in my posts) but I would suspect its one of two things

(1) Your manager/organisation is one of those very small number now that are obsessive about grammar, syntax etc and for whom a split infinitive is almost a cardinal sin. If that's the case then take heart that most organisations aren't and it won't hold you back in other organisations (and my personal view is that to the horror of many/some the world where this is important is rapidly receding). This isn't excusing elementary spelling mistakes - but your post shows no sign of that.

(2) It's about how you present arguments and the narrative in documents. Its a personally view but I find many HR people actually very poor at being able to structure a concise, compelling document that draws the reader into it, takes them quickly through the key points and leaves them with the conclusion and next steps. This is a skill you can practice and get better at. Crack it and you will go far, don't and you can still go far just not as quickly :-) 

I would always focus on (2) over (1)

In reply to Keith:

Thank you!

In reply to Elizabeth Divver:

Hi Carly,

"It may only be a small sample, but having read your post I cannot agree with your manager that your written English is "show stopping". We all seem to have understood you with no difficulty."

I agree with Elizabeth. Your post above is very well-written including little nuances that I would have said were above average (if we're going to measure things like that).

In reply to Cass Clothier:

Hey Carly, Looking at my initial response to you I realise I overlooked the fact that you have stated that you have already passed your first unit in the CPP. Also as many others have stated, there is nothing in your initial or subsequent posts that suggest any issue with communication so I humbly apologise - this is the first thing that I should have said to you. Having worked with some pretty exacting people in the early years of my HR career I honed in on how to 'help' rather than fully acknowledging that your managers comments are probably down to personal style, tastes and nothing more. :-)

In reply to Cass Clothier:

Hi Cass, thank you. The feedback on here has made me feel much better.

In reply to Carly:

Welcome to the Community, Carly :)