Lunch & Learn Seminars

Top Mistakes Presenters Make — and How to Avoid Them

This presentation skills seminar examines common errors made by presenters and considers ways to avoid them. Areas of focus include body language, eye contact, voice, nervousness, and confidence. Where time permits, the seminar also covers strategies for incorporating visual aids into presentations. During the session, some participants have the opportunity to address the group and receive feedback from the instructor and group members.

PowerPoint Addiction: Can It Be Treated?

Many of history's most famous and influential speeches were given long before the advent of Microsoft PowerPoint. Today, however, many professionals use the words presentation and PowerPoint interchangeably, reflecting pervasive confusion about the nature of each. A presentation is an oral communication that may or may not require visual aids. PowerPoint is merely a technological tool, albeit a useful one, that helps people create visual aids; it should not be used, for example, to create an outline of a talk that is then simply read to an audience. This seminar examines ways PowerPoint can help — or hurt — a speaker's talk.

Tips for Telephone Professionalism

This seminar considers some of the most common missteps in telephone communications and offers guidance on how to avoid them. Seminar topics include speaking volume, pace, voicemail greetings and messages, conference call protocol, and more.

Become a Better Editor

Careful editing can make the difference between good writing and bad writing. Whether you are responsible for revising other people’s writing or would simply like to become a better editor of your own work, this seminar covers techniques and resources that can help you approach the editing task more professionally and systematically.

Better Business Letters

Today many businesspeople favor e-mail correspondence over the traditional business letter. Even in an electronic age, though, business letters have a significant role to play in professional correspondence. This luncheon writing seminar offers instruction in business letter basics — layout, style, structure, and other requirements of effective correspondence — while also offering guidance on how to avoid common business letter missteps.

Memos, Letters, and E-Mail: A Survey of Form and Function

Many professionals now rely so heavily on e-mail that they no longer recognize the defining characteristics of the traditional memo and letter forms. This business writing seminar covers each of the three main categories of modern business correspondence — memos, letters, and e-mail — and reviews the key differences in format and function.

Polish Your Punctuation!

The rise of e-mail — and quick, casual, often underpunctuated communications — has increased many professionals' punctuation uncertainty. Questions abound regarding correct practices for semicolons, dashes, colons, ellipses, exclamation points, and more. This grammar seminar offers a quick refresher on common punctuation errors, with an emphasis on those most prevalent in e-mail messages.

Some Top Grammatical Problems — and How to Overcome Them

Are you confounded by commas? Unsure how to choose between which and that? Do your subjects sometimes disagree with your verbs? This grammar seminar provides professionals with solutions to a sampling of some persistent grammatical problems.

E-Mail Etiquette

This seminar covers questions of e-mail form and etiquette, including salutations, closings, signature files, punctuation, and capitalization. Other topics include ethical issues associated with copying and forwarding capabilities, as well as strategies for reducing e-mail volume and improving efficiency. The seminar concludes with a brief discussion of the limitations of e-mail.