Date: Saturday 15 November 2014
Time: 09:30 – 17:15 h
Location: Park Plaza Hotel, Utrecht
Cost: €170 for members; €190 for non-members. Cost includes buffet lunch, coffee/tea, and drinks afterwards in the lobby.

Register and pay here (SENSE members)
Non-member registration and payment

Attendance list (only visible to SENSE members)

PE points: If you would like to receive PE points for this workshop, please bring your Bureau Btv registration number to the workshop. If enough people indicate they wish to be eligible for PE points, we will apply for them.

If you have any further questions, please contact Maartje Gorte

Effective Information Packaging

Writing and editing can go much further than simply making sure a text is grammatically correct. Correct texts might still not flow well. Correct texts might still not sound right. And correct texts might still harbour a variety of small problems that don’t necessarily qualify as ‘wrong’ but will still put your readers off, make them feel your text is irrelevant or boring, or – perhaps worst of all – cause them to misunderstand you.

This workshop is about cultivating the eagle’s eye you need to take a text from ‘nothing really wrong with it’ to ‘excellent.’ This process actually has very little to do with innate skill or talent. You just need the willingness to delve deeply into the shape and structure of sentences, and the knowledge how to improve what needs improving.

Effective Information Packaging is a full-day workshop for editors, copywriters, and translators. It deals with how you can best organise information in a sentence to improve readability and maximise text coherence. The workshop covers several modules, each containing a hands-on editing assignment. Questions addressed include the following:

• What makes a good list?
• What can go wrong when writers use the word ‘and’?
• When are short sentences best avoided?
• What benefits can be gained by putting certain information at the end of the sentence?

Mike Hannay, a long-standing member of SENSE, is a Professor of English Language at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. His research focuses on how to best organise information in texts, and he likes to teach advanced skills with a healthy dose of theoretical background. By the end of the workshop, you’ll know how to produce texts with improved readability and flow, and you’ll know how to explain to your clients why you made the choices you made.

About Mike Hannay

Mike Hannay is a Professor of English Language at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. His research interests lie in the relationship between grammar and discourse, in particular with regards to the organisation of information at the level of the complex sentence. In terms of language teaching, his primary goal is to incorporate insights from functional and text-oriented linguistics into advanced skills programmes.

Mike Hannay has taught text editing courses since 1991 and has co-authored and edited a range of textbooks and dictionaries for the Dutch and German-speaking markets. In addition, he is a member of the Nationaal Kwaliteitsinstituut tolken en vertalen, a committee that provides advice on codes of practise, testing, and professional training to sworn translators and interpreters in the Netherlands in the framework of new legislation.

Over the past 15 years, Mike Hannay has given many workshops on academic English, translating, and editing skills to professional groups in the Netherlands and abroad, including sessions for the translation departments of the European Commission.