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BackDRAFT Delivers Business Writing System Aimed at Mending Corporate America's Writing Crisis

Industry's First Quality Management System for Business Writing Helps Organizations Boost Writing Efficiency, Build Stronger Brands, and Increase Sales

OTTAWA-July 18, 2005-BackDRAFT, a leading provider of Business Writing Training Solutions, today announced the release of its flagship product, BackDRAFT QMS (Quality Management System), the first and only technology application that results in a sustainable, uniform writing style across groups or throughout an enterprise. Communicating effectively with all constituents-customers, investors, analysts, partners, media, employees.-is necessary to build and maintain successful brands. BackDRAFT QMS enables organizations to improve corporate productivity through speeding up writing processes and boosting revenue through precise and engaging email, marketing collateral, proposals, presentations and web content.

According to recent surveys of 120 American corporations and 50 state government institutions by the National Commission on Writing (2004-2005), while two-thirds of all workers are expected to write their own emails, letters, proposals and presentations, one-third are unable to write clear, logical prose. Email has become the predominate writing activity for most business professionals, accounting for more than two work hours per day per person, or 400 hours per year. The surveys also found that writing ability is now a core competence requirement for advancement. People who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired and are unlikely to last long enough to be considered for promotion.

"In today's fast-paced, highly competitive world, clear and concise writing is no longer a specialized skill-it's essential," said Richard Sterling, executive director of the National Writing Project. "The business community is realizing the value of competent writing; in addition to supporting education initiatives to better equip students for the business world, organizations are increasing the amount of time and money they spend on professional writing training."

"The time it takes to create written communication is a huge hit on the corporate payroll, and a critical component of how corporations and brands are perceived," said Brian Hanington, president and CEO of BackDRAFT. "If companies can maintain a high-quality standard writing style across internal and external communications, they can effectively use written communication as a strategic tool to win sales, garner partnerships and evolve their image. We developed BackDRAFT QMS so that companies could escape the restrictions of individual training and quickly master high writing standards at a group level."

BackDRAFT QMS is a writing-quality management system that corporations can use to produce precise, engaging and coherent writing. The three-part system allows the organization to establish a clear writing standard, trains all necessary employees to be able to meet that standard, and imbeds an editing system that ensures that the standard is met any time a document is written-be it a proposal, a presentation or even an email.

BackDRAFT QMS incorporates an organization's existing writing style and brand guidelines, and augments that style with a set of principles by which writers can spot, name and fix the 40 most common fumbles in writing. The heart of the system is an 18-hour, personalized online curriculum that teaches company staff how to produce documents with flawless grammar, diction, syntax, logic and rhetoric.

BackDRAFT QMS includes the following unique features:

• Customized Courseware-Advanced learning software in which all course content reflects the issues, products, terminology and brand context of the client organization.
• 1-on-1 Guided Curriculum-A self-paced training curriculum that monitors the writer's performance and adjusts the focus and difficulty of the curriculum.
• Mentor On-Call-A hybrid software/human customer-experience management tool that responds immediately to changes in a writer's performance and progress during the online training program.
• Visual Editing-A Flash(tm)-based learning environment in which words, phrases, sentences and whole paragraphs move around on the screen as they do in a seasoned writer's mind, providing a visual correction process that the writer can easily understand and replicate in work situations.
• BackDRAFT DEX (Document Editing Xpress)-A peer-review process that cuts editing time by as much as half, and enables the achievement of a consistent group or organizational writing standard.
• Online Class-progress Views-Role-based, password-protected Web access to individual, class, departmental and enterprise performance stats.
• Genre Independence-A flexible QMS that can be quickly applied to any type of writing, including email, visual presentations, reports and proposals.

About BackDRAFT
BackDRAFT is a leading provider of Business Writing Training Solutions that help organizations build stronger brands and better serve customers and partners through the written word. The BackDRAFT Quality Management System (QMS) is the industry's only business writing system that results in a sustainable, uniform writing style across a group or organization. Benefiting a variety of companies in diverse industries worldwide, BackDRAFT QMS enables organizations to harness writing intelligence potential to improve corporate productivity, enhance branding efforts and boost revenue through better overall business practices. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, BackDRAFT was founded in 2003 by the leadership team of Stiff Sentences, Inc., the world's first company of writers to achieve ISO 9000 registration. For more information about BackDRAFT, visit www.backdraft.org

OTTAWA-July 18, 2005

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