Master in Management
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Elective Course Syllabi
- Case Studies in Corporate Sustainability
- Essentials of Business Writing
- Finance for Nonfinancial Managers
- Fundamentals of Project Management
- Giving Effective Feedback
- The Leader as Coach
- Mastering Grammar and Style
- Mediation and Conflict Management
- Negotiating to Win
- Nonprofit Grant Writing and Government Relations
- Nonprofit Volunteerism, Board Development and Community Mobilization
- Organizational Coaching
- Persuasive Business Writing
- Presentation Skills for Professionals
- Sustainable Organizational Leadership
- Working with Emotional Intelligence
Electives
Essentials of Business Writing (Winter Term Course, 2 credits)
Hart Wilson, MM
Course Overview
Communication skills are critically important in today’s world. We receive and send many email messages daily and our writing skills are showcased in every message. With increasingly sophisticated technologies for communication, it is more and more important to know how to convey a professional image in everything we do.
This course will provide opportunities to practice and perfect written language skills including grammar, punctuation, and word usage. You will use these skills to compose and produce a variety of business documents: email, letters, memos, reports, etc. You will learn the most effective way to write each type of document, focusing on style, format, and content. You will also enhance your ability to proofread business documents to ensure that they are clear, succinct, complete, accurate, consistent, and courteous. You will become a better communicator by enhancing your ability to analyze an audience to determine the language, tone, style, and format that will be most appropriate to express your message.
Required Texts
Leadership Communication by Deborah J. Barrett, 2007 (available in the SOU bookstore).
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation by Jane Straus, 2007 (available online).
Complete details for these books are available in the course Blackboard (Bb) site.
Course Objectives
The objectives for this course are simple and straightforward: participants will improve their writing and editing skills. Specifically, you will:
- Enhance your ability to communicate effectively and professionally in writing.
- Apply effective writing and formatting techniques to e-mail messages, memos, routine letters, persuasive messages, negative messages, informal reports, proposals, and formal reports.
- Compose messages that are readable, use appropriate language, apply parallelism, and use graphic highlighting to convey ideas clearly to readers.