Grammar for Grown-Ups

Have you ever felt that poor grammar skills cause your staff’s communication to appear unprofessional, or, worse yet, careless and ineffective? In this hands-on session, your staff will learn how to prevent the following common grammatical mistakes that can hamper communication and ultimately hurt your company’s credibility:

1. Recognize and avoid sentence fragments, fused sentences, and comma splices once and for all.
2. Choose the correct word by learning when to use affect/effect and other frequently misused word pairs.
3. Master the rules of subject-verb agreement. (Example: She is one of those directors who always manages/manage to support her staff.)
4. Craft effective sentences and learn when and how to use commas, semicolons, colons, slashes, dashes, and apostrophes with confidence in documents.
5. Identify and correct dangling and misplaced modifiers. (Example: Mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with a round bottom for efficient beating.)
6. Eliminate pronoun case confusion by learning when to use who/whom, I/me, she/her, and he/him. (Example: Just between you and I/me, I’d prefer to hold the meeting after lunch.)
7. Avoid gender-biased language: the he/she dilemma.
8. Use grammar and spell-checker software effectively.

Pre-work: Have your staff bring their most pressing grammar questions to class.