Fireline
Services
Mary combines
workplace and training experience with her ongoing pursuit
of higher education in the fields of adult education, training
and technical writing to bring updated and relevant training
and consulting to your workplace. Mary's experience and training
allow her to work with you to provide the writing or training
related services that your company needs. This section describes
a variety of services that Mary offers.
"Ignite
Your Writing!"™ seminars
"Ignite Your Writing!"™ seminars are designed
to elevate writing skills and standards in the fire service.
These seminars examine business and legal standards that are
driving the demand for clear, concise, and correct report
writing from the fire service. The seminars illustrate the
risks posed by current practices and demonstrate ways to improve
professional reports and papers.
The seminars target three main goals:
- to persuade members of the fire service that their writing
skills impact their professional development and their
department's image
- to instill confidence that good writing skills are an
attainable goal
- to provide the tools needed to achieve good writing
skills.
Seminars are adaptable to a variety of audiences such as
chief-level officers, line officers, line firefighters, investigators,
new hires, and office staff. Audiences with a mix of the above
positions usually work well.
Seminar
Options:
Seminars are adaptable to a variety of audiences such as
officer development participants, chief-level officers,
line officers, line firefighters, investigators, recruits,
and office staff, or a mixture of the above.
Other topics are available. Fireline can customize a course
to address written documents or needs that are unique to
your agency.
Detailed
descriptions:
Best Business Practices for E-Mail & Memos
How do you, your employees, and/or your co-workers know what is expected when writing internal and external e-mails? Email has become the primary vehicle for workplace communications. Many employees learned how to operate in the e-mail environment as children and teenagers; others were self-taught as adults. If the workplace does not provide specific guidance about expectations for sending workplace-related e-mail, habits developed in a less formal environment emerge, sometimes creating image problems for the sender and the company represented by the sender.
- Common e-mail problems.
- Ways to organize coherently.
- How to use e-mail features such as headers and subject lines appropriately.
- Readability factors.
- How to get your e-mail read and acted upon.
- Good e-mail manners.
- Changing laws and changing practices for e-mail.
- Customer service issues: professional tone and image.
Mary can customize this topic to address an individual company’s specific needs.
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Basic
Business Writing Skills for Fire and EMS
This seminar offers tips to help people in the fire service
make simple, subtle, and high impact improvements to their
professional writing skills. The session provides a fast-moving
and lighthearted review of grammar. It shows weak spellers
how to manage the problem so that they, too, can submit
error-free documents. The seminar provides the rules and
tools to help participants gain confidence in their own
abilities and the know-how to actually improve their writing.
Some benefits that participants can expect to gain include
the following:
- Increasing their confidence in workplace writing
abilities
- Improving their professional images
- Becoming stronger candidates in promotional
exams
This
basic class includes the following topics:
- Basic technical writing skills for a variety of reports.
- Techniques to overcome writer's block.
- A fresh look at and a fun review of basic grammar
skills.
- A painless review of punctuation.
- A review of run-on sentences and fragments.
- Tips for dealing with weak spelling skills.
- Tips to help proofread and edit quickly and effectively.
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Accident
Investigation Reports
Acquire a useful format to guide you in writing accident/injury
reports that benefit injured personnel and provide relevant
details for admin and insurance companies. Participants
will critique accident reports and will then practice
writing a sample or real accident investigation report.
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Strengthening
Fire and EMS Report Narratives
This half-day session focuses on the narrative portion
of fire and EMS reports. It includes instruction on basic
elements that should be included in any report narrative.
Participants will evaluate several sample fire and/or
EMS reports, paying close attention to the need for complete
information. Additionally, students will write and evaluate
their own narratives.
How
to write and deliver persuasive proposals and convincing
requests.
Learn how to prepare, organize, structure, and edit basic
proposals. All too often, fire service personnel rely
on informal verbal requests to acquire the things they
need. In this era of diminishing budgets, the need to
construct convincing requests and proposals has become
more apparent. Participants will learn a basic proposal
format to help simplify the proposal and request-writing
process and will become familiar with elements of persuasion
that strengthen the process. Lessons learned in this session
could be applied to simple station requests, budget requests,
policy change requests, or to more formal requests for
equipment, staffing, support, etc.
This seminar shows that the likelihood of getting what
you need is directly linked to how clearly, correctly,
completely, and convincingly you state your case in writing.
Participants can take the proposal material back to their
firehouses and instruct other firefighters on how to use
the format to bring higher quality requests to their departments
and boards.
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How
to Write Procedures, Directives, Instructions, and Internal
Memos
Discover
effective formats to use for procedures and instructions.
Receive a short course on useful writing tools for these
applications. Evaluate and compose procedures and memos.
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Writing
fitness for training officers and instructors
This
session focuses on the writing responsibilities of training
officers. It can be customized for specific audiences.
The description below is a general outline that would
work for many training audiences.
Participants will:
- Learn
that their writing impacts their professional development
and their professional images.
-
Discover effective formats to use for procedures and
directives.
-
Receive a short course on useful writing tools for instructors.
- Evaluate
and compose writing procedures.
-
Demonstrate outcome of class-generated procedures.
Professional
writing skills for company officers
When firefighters promote to officer-level positions,
they often find themselves responsible for a multitude
of writing responsibilities for which they feel unprepared.
This session zeroes in on some of the position's writing
requirements listed in NFPA 1021, Standard for Fire Officer
Professional Qualifications. This session addresses a
few of 1021's recommendations by providing formats and
general guidelines for writing memos, letters (internal
and external), procedures, and accident reports. This
class will also include a review of how to write unified,
well-developed, and coherent paragraphs.
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Five-step
guide to elevating writing standards in your department
Geared to supervisors who want to make system-wide improvements.
(More time = more steps)
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Business
Writing Skills
Geared to non fire-service audiences
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Conference
Seminar Speaker
Join a long list of state and national fire chief, fire
instructor, firefighter, and arson investigator associations
in including one of Mary's dynamic and convincing presentations
in your upcoming professional conferences.
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Program
Development Services
Allow Fireline to help develop new programs for officer
development programs, acting company officer programs, recruit
academies, etc. and/or the manuals to support the programs.
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Individual
Tutoring
Let Fireline help you prepare for upcoming promotional
exams by working directly on your own writing needs.
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Editing
Services
Allow Fireline to assemble, write, rewrite, edit, spruce
up, and/or proofread policy and procedure manuals, strategic
plans, SOPs, annual reports, and other committee-generated
reports and training manuals.
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Development
or evaluation services for graded, written components on promotional
exams
Departments are increasingly including graded, written
exercises in all promotional exams. Fireline can help departments
or assessment companies develop appropriate exercises and
objective evaluation tools to help provide fair and quantifiable
measures for written exercises.
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Consulting
services
Fireline can help your agency identify workable solutions
to your writing issues.
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