Business communications consulting

Moonshot first approached Margaret because, after a period of rapid growth, we wanted to ensure consistency of writing style and accuracy across our team. We also knew we needed someone who would be open to tailoring their training to our needs and existing style guide.

Margaret immediately took a deep interest in the seriousness of our subject matter and understood the importance of consistency and clarity in everything we produce. She began by focusing on the elements that lay behind our written work: the standards, processes and common terms we employ. Specifically, she pulled them apart, identified the elements which were likely making writing harder for the team, and rebuilt them.

Next, Margaret helped us obtain internal buy-in for the new set of standards, processes and common terms – all of which she wrote up in a new version of our Style Guide.

The final step was to train the team. Having incorporated our new style into her training modules, Margaret trained 40 team members over the course of four two-day sessions. The team learned how to plan their writing and structure their reports; make them more skim-readable, vivid and concise; prioritize their audiences’ needs; identify critical nuggets of information; and proofread. Margaret also launched our new report writing process, which is now firmly in place.

We were delighted with the results. The courses were engaging and fun, and received excellent feedback from across the team. We highly recommend Margaret as an expert writer and trainer.

Our objective was to improve the quality of our investment papers through training and coaching our team.

Margaret initially delivered a consulting project, advising us on the most effective writing techniques. The output was a company-specific Style Guide. New team members are trained with reference to the Style Guide and offered one-on-one coaching sessions to review their work and suggest areas of focus.

Overall, the standard of writing across the team has significantly improved and the review process is more efficient. Senior team members are now focussing more on the content of our papers, as opposed to the formatting and wording.

I would highly recommend Margaret’s services to any organisation where long-form prose is a key skill for their profession.

We worked with Margaret to focus on the consistency of our approach to written communication across the business. I found her to be extremely knowledgeable and very professional. She understood our business and our objectives for our Tone of Voice and Plain English courses in detail.

In the accompanying consulting project, Margaret provided us with some excellent tools to support our teams which were a Writing Guide, a Technical Terms Glossary and a Reviewers’ Guide. These documents were an integral part of the training given to our teams and continue to be used within our business today.