Course Highlights
This English grammar course will:
- Establish why grammar errors cost organizations credibility and what the business consequences look like when writing reflects poorly on the people and teams behind it.
- Cover the parts of speech and their function in professional writing.
- Examine sentence types and structure and give participants a working understanding of how English sentences are built.
- Address the grammar errors that appear most consistently in professional writing, including fragments, run-ons, comma splices, and misplaced modifiers.
- Build skills in subject-verb agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement, where errors are common and often invisible to the writer.
- Introduce parallel structure as a tool for producing writing that is easier to read and harder to misunderstand.
- Close with a proofreading process focused on catching the grammar errors that most often survive a casual review.
Program Overview
Grammar errors signal something to a reader. They signal that the writer either does not know the rules or did not care enough to apply them. In professional communication, both readings damage credibility, and credibility is not easily rebuilt once a reader has made that judgment. The person who misreads a poorly constructed sentence, the client who notices the subject and verb do not agree, the manager who catches a dangling modifier in an external report — these readers draw conclusions that go beyond the sentence in front of them. They draw conclusions about the organization.
This half-day workshop addresses the grammar problems that appear most often in professional writing and gives participants the tools to eliminate them. The session does not start at the beginning of a grammar textbook and work forward. It starts with the errors that matter most in a workplace writing context and works backward to the rules that explain and correct them.
The day opens by establishing why grammar accuracy matters to an organization and what the real cost of consistent errors looks like. From there, the workshop moves through sentence structure, the parts of speech, agreement, modifiers, and parallel structure, with practice at every step. The session closes with a focused proofreading process that gives participants a repeatable approach for catching grammar errors before documents reach their audience.
The following outline highlights some of the course’s learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).
Program Objectives
At the program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:
- Identify the parts of speech and explain how each functions in a sentence.
- Distinguish between sentence types and construct each type correctly.
- Recognize and correct sentence errors, including fragments, run-ons, and comma splices.
- Apply correct subject-verb agreement across a range of sentence structures, including those with compound subjects and intervening phrases.
- Use correct pronoun-antecedent agreement, with attention to the errors that appear most frequently in professional writing.
- Identify and correct misplaced and dangling modifiers.
- Apply parallel structure to produce writing that is consistent, clear, and easy to follow.
- Use a structured proofreading process to catch grammar errors before documents go out.
Workshop Modules
Prepping for Planting: Know the Resources
The session opens by establishing the stakes. Grammar errors in professional writing are not style preferences or minor oversights. They signal carelessness, undermine credibility, and create the kind of impression that is difficult to reverse once a reader has formed it. This part of the day examines what grammar accuracy costs an organization when it is absent and what it signals when it is consistently present. The group will also survey the grammar resources available to professional writers, including the style guides, reference tools, and checking habits that sustain accuracy across a team without requiring every writer to memorize every rule. Participants will assess their own grammar confidence and identify the specific errors they know they make, setting the focus for the rest of the session.
Assemble the Necessary Tools: Sentence Types and Structure
Professional writers who understand how a sentence is built make fewer errors in their own sentences and catch more errors in other people’s. This part of the workshop examines the four sentence types used in English, how each functions and when each serves a writer’s purpose, and how sentence structure shapes the clarity and emphasis of a message. The group will work through the relationship between subjects, verbs, objects, and complements and examine how phrases and clauses attach to sentences in ways that either clarify or complicate meaning. Participants will practice constructing and identifying sentence types in examples drawn from professional writing contexts.
Plant with a Purpose: The Role of Meaning and Function
Parts of speech are not abstract grammar categories. They are functional roles that words play in a sentence, and understanding those roles helps a writer make deliberate choices about how a sentence works. This part of the day examines the parts of speech in the context of professional writing, with attention to the roles that produce the most errors: pronouns, which require agreement with their antecedents; verbs, which require agreement with their subjects; and modifiers, which require clear attachment to the words they modify. The group will work through the specific agreement errors that appear most consistently in workplace writing, including errors with collective nouns, compound subjects, and indefinite pronouns, and practice identifying and correcting them in real sentences.
Get Rid of Those Weeds: Avoiding Common Grammar Problems
This is the section that addresses the errors that concern most organizations when they schedule this workshop. Fragments, run-ons, comma splices, misplaced modifiers, dangling modifiers — these are the patterns that reviewers catch, that clients notice, and that make a writer look less capable than they are. The discussion examines each error type directly: what produces it, why it survives a casual read-through, and how to correct it with confidence. Participants will work through a substantial editing exercise, identifying and correcting all of these error types in a document drawn from a professional writing context. The group will also examine the difference between genuine grammar errors and style choices that some readers flag as errors but that are, in fact, correct — a distinction that saves writers time and reduces unnecessary second-guessing.
Stake Your Ideas: Punctuation for Clarity
Grammar and punctuation are not separate disciplines. They work together to create sentences that communicate exactly what the writer intends. This part of the session examines the punctuation decisions that most directly reflect grammar structure, including how commas function at clause boundaries, how semicolons connect independent clauses, and how the relationship between sentence structure and punctuation determines whether a sentence is clear or ambiguous. The group will practice applying this integrated understanding to sentences that require both a grammar judgment and a punctuation decision, building the kind of dual awareness that produces writing that is both correct and clean.
Harvest the Rewards: Proofreading for Error-Free Writing
The session closes with a structured proofreading process specifically designed for grammar errors. This final discussion examines what a grammar-focused proofreading pass requires, how it differs from reading for meaning, and how to identify the specific error patterns in a writer’s own work that account for most of their problems. Participants will apply this process to a document from the session and practice using the Word Audit tool to flag the constructions and word choices that most frequently signal underlying grammar problems. Writers leave with a faster, more reliable approach to reviewing their own writing and a clearer sense of the specific rules they need to apply most consistently.
Target Audience
This workshop is designed for groups that want to:
- Reduce the grammar errors that undermine the credibility and professionalism of their written communication.
- Give writers a working understanding of English grammar that they can apply confidently to the documents they produce every day.
- Build a shared standard for grammatical accuracy across a team or department.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is this workshop designed for?
This workshop suits professionals at any level whose writing reaches clients, leadership, partners, or the public and who make grammar errors that undermine the quality and credibility of that communication. It fits both writers who know they struggle with grammar and writers who are unaware of the specific errors they make consistently.
Will the workshop feel like a grammar class from school?
No. The session does not start at page one of a grammar textbook. It starts with the errors that matter most in a professional writing context and addresses the rules that explain and correct them. The emphasis throughout stays on practical application rather than abstract grammar terminology.
Can we pair this with the punctuation workshop?
Yes, and we recommend it. The grammar and punctuation workshops cover complementary ground and together produce a thorough mechanical writing review. We deliver them back to back as a full-day program or on separate days. Either format works.
Will participants work on their own documents?
Yes. We encourage participants to bring documents from their own work. Where clients share materials before the session, we build the practice exercises around those documents.
Does the workshop address the difference between grammar rules and style preferences?
Yes. One of the most useful things a professional writer can do is distinguish between a genuine grammar error and a style preference that a reader has flagged incorrectly. The workshop addresses this directly and gives participants the confidence to make that distinction without second-guessing every sentence.
Do you offer a virtual version of this program?
Yes. We deliver a virtual version of this program in a multi-segment format. Contact us to discuss options.