Get Results! - Six Steps to Winning Written Communication

Effective written communications is a secret key to success in business.

Follow these six steps to enhance your writing skills and increase your ROI today!

1. Before you begin to write, define your goal and audience. What do you wish to accomplish? Who will receive your written communication? Your intended recipient influences both word choice and tone of your project.

2. Use attention-grabbing sentences or headers and visuals to hook your reader. You have about 30 seconds to capture the reader. Too much boring text is a complete turnoff. Use vivid prose and pictures to reinforce your point.

3. Regarding content, what is the benefit for the reader? What does she or gain by purchasing your service or product? After a captivating entrée, deliver the sizzle, but not the steak. Solve a problem. Make a situation easier. Be responsive to the potential customer's need or desire. Get an order!

4. Check your spelling, diction, and punctuation. Use a style guide if necessary to add uniformity to your document(s). Nothing detracts more from your effectiveness than misspellings and poor grammar.

5. What is your call to action? Do you want a phone call or an email? Include this information and your website. Ask for the business; you might just get it.

6. Find an objective reader. What is the person's reaction to the document? Are there any errors or omissions? Before printing hundreds of flyers, make sure the document is top notch before going out the door.

*** If you are in São Paulo and need English lessons, or Elite English Services including translations (Spanish/French/Portuguese to English), please contact Professor Winn by sending an email to mrenglish101@gmail.com for a prompt evaluation. Buy your English-language texts today!

Can you learn a language online?

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill grabbed headlines last October in deciding to offer its introduction to Spanish classes exclusively online.

The increase in high-band Internet access at home, revolutionary software programs like Skype, and an explosion of convenient online opportunities have combined to force brick-and-mortar universities to compete in cyber educational arena.

Online Language Learning Works?
While some subjects like calculus and history may be adaptable outside the traditional classroom, what about languages?

Modern languages can indeed take their rightful position along with other university classes online.

While not privy to the setup of the Spanish classes at UNC-Chapel Hill, introduction classes for any language are delicate. Students need to be able to listen and mimic the language to speak it. Thus, a heavy audio and/or video component would be necessary.

From experience, as both student and teacher, online courses are customarily divided into self-contained modules in which students are exposed to new material every week. Homework is submitted by school-based email using Blackboard or another content management system.

In the case of a language program, students could record an audio file and upload it for the professor to grade.

And for office hours? Fire up Skype or MSN. My Skype ID is professorwinn. Notice the Skype button in the lower right column.

Conclusion
A pioneer in online education was MIT's Open Courseware Project. Its free modern language offerings include Chinese, French, Spanish, and German. Unlike the UNC Spanish class, no university credit is given.

Other institutions have joined MIT's lead as learning a plethora of subjects online becomes a reality.

Spanish and Portuguese speakers also have a key to online courses via Universia.

Have you taken a language class online? What was your experience?

*** If you are in São Paulo and need English lessons, or Elite English Services including translations (Spanish/French/Portuguese to English), please contact Professor Winn by sending an email to mrenglish101@gmail.com for a prompt evaluation. Buy your English-language texts today!

What were the 10 most translated languages in 2010?

According to the Kwintessential translation services firm, the Top 10 most translated languages to/from English in 2010 were:


1.French
2.German
3.Spanish
4.Arabic
5.Italian
6.Chinese
7.Dutch
8.Russian
9.Polish
10.Portuguese


Three of my languages, from French, Spanish, and Portuguese to English, made the top 10.

Is it surprising that Polish is in the top tier of the list?

For the next five languages, visit their site.
*** If you are in São Paulo and need English lessons, or Elite English Services including translations (Spanish/French/Portuguese to English), please contact Professor Winn by sending an email to mrenglish101@gmail.com for a prompt evaluation. Buy your English-language texts today!