Presented by Mary Sovick

Ignite Your WritingÔ seminars are designed to elevate writing skills in the fire service. They examine business and legal standards that are driving the demand for clear, concise, and correct documents. Seminars illustrate the risks posed by current practices and demonstrate ways to improve professional reports, proposals, e-mail, letters to citizens, and other work-related documents.

Sessions include a mix of lecture, small group exercises, individual practice exercises, skits, and other active learning methods.

Full day session: Focuses on writing respectable final documents

Content includes:

·         Techniques to overcome writer's block.

·         A fresh look at and a fun review of basic grammar skills:

-        A painless review of commonly misused comma and semicolon rules.

-        A review of run-on sentences and fragments.

-        A review of confusing pronouns: it’s vs. its, who’s vs. whose, I vs. me vs. myself.

·         Tips on how to write concisely (without omitting important details).

·         Tips for dealing with weak spelling skills.

·         Tips to help proofread and edit quickly and effectively.

The full-day course emphasizes the link between officers’ written images and their professional images. Additionally, practice exercises use sentences that resemble those the officers might need to write on any given workday.

This relevance sets this seminar apart from other “English classes” that participants might have previously taken, allowing even weak writers to leave with higher levels of confidence in their writing abilities.

About the instructor, Mary Sovick

Mary is a retired firefighter from the South Metro (Denver) Fire Department; a national trainer, author, and speaker; a member of the ISFSI board of directors, and an NFA adjunct instructor.