Writing Impact Summaries – In-company training

Researchers in all organisations need to demonstrate to a general audience the benefits of their research.

This training course, based on your own case studies, gives you the skills and techniques to produce impact summaries that communicate the features and benefits of your work. We will take you through the process of producing an impact summary from start to finish.  An outline for this session follows, but please note that we will need further information on your impact summaries in order to add more detail, and really fine-tune the session to your precise needs, and we will ask you to bring material with you on which to base two impact summaries

One day in-company training course covering:

  • Why are you producing this document and what does it aim to achieve?
  • The importance of communicating features and benefits
  • Understanding who you are writing for and what they want from your document
  • What will interest them but what will make them stop reading?
  • What we know about all 21st Century readers and taking short attention spans into account
  • Prioritising your information and distilling your main points into a sentence
  • Getting that message across
  • The importance of planning and identifying the points you want to make
  • Highlighting benefits
  • Getting your information into the optimum order and borrowing useful structures from other types of writing
  • What information should be included to support your overall message?
  • Fitting your information into the summary structure
  • The key parts of the impact summary
  • Deciding which information to include and which to leave out
  • Determining the order
  • Writing to communicate – some simple rules
  • Why you should vary sentence lengths and why too many clauses obscure your meaning
  • Identifying when academic language becomes jargon
  • Matching your language with your audience
  • Making your writing clear and compelling
  • How to avoid using superfluous words
  • The importance of active verbs
  • Common errors to avoid
  • The POWER method of effective writing

Actions and follow-up

This course provides you with practical skills that you can apply immediately to your own impact summaries. We send you away with a list of “To dos” to focus on after your training, so you can put into practice what you have learned; and we follow-up with you afterwards to see how you are getting on. We are always available if you have any queries at all, so you just need to let us know.

Enjoyed it and feel that it will make an immediate difference to my ability to write case studies. One of the most useful training sessions ever attended. Met requirements - will use it all.

Commercialisation manager, University of Strathclyde