FULL STOP
Full Stop Mentoring offers a real time, immediately reactive and interpersonal mentoring service to develop business writing skills with staff whose first language might not be English.
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Editorial skills development is a key point of strategic concern for many South African companies, media and communication agencies. In an economy where English is the de facto language of communication, but where the home language of the staff member could be any of eleven options, it's a mission-critical challenge to deliver high quality services to clients while still giving talented employees the necessary room to develop and grow.
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Full Stop Mentoring uses online project management technologies to provide a real-time, collaborative mechanism for ongoing editorial development. Mentors work with individuals and project teams in the virtual project space to assess editorial approach, writing style and execution and grammar – all within the context of their daily work.
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The result is a neutral and nurturing envrionment for language development, where staff are supported by the tools and expert guidance necessary to analyse and assess their approach to the job at hand before attempting to deliver on it; and then to assess the results of their work against the stated objectives.
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Full Stop mentors work with writers to evaluate the clarity and accuracy of their work, in the process laying a foundation for lucid, explicit and concise business writing – from ad copy to reports, proposals, press releases, training materials or any other document.
A virtual editorial development program
* Use online project management tools to create a specific editorial development process for the team
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* Use real projects and real time interaction to develop skills - get away from theoretical learning
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* Live support within the portal is offered during working hours from specialist mentors
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* Full support for the team as they execute their editorial strategy: support ranges from strategic (creating briefs, asking for re-writes, selecting topics) through to technical (proofreading and sub-editing)
Teamlab
Teamlab is an open source project management facility which allows the company concerned to receive practical, day-to-day mentoring via chat functions, a document sharing system, a wikipedia, forums and various sharing tools.
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In effect Teamlab allows for the creation of a repository of company specific editorial information, guidance and advice.
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Why does the creation of this company specific repository matter? It allows the company to move away from a scenario where all the editorial expertise resides with individuals. Instead, the expertise lives in the repository - so, if a team member departs, they do not take all the crucial editorial skills with them.
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Full Stop uses Teamlab to develop a company specific approach to editorial development - the various development elements are applied according to the specific context of each organisation.