A disclosure before anything else: we run business writing workshops for a living. You should read everything below the way you'd read a barista's blog on whether coffee is good for you. With that said, the honest answer to the question is more interesting than a sales page, because it's: it depends, the failure mode is well documented, and the difference between workshops that work and workshops that don't is fairly well understood.
The case against (which we'll make first, since nobody else selling training will)
Training of all kinds has a transfer problem: what happens in the workshop has a tendency to stay in the workshop. In one well-cited study, training professionals across 150 organisations estimated that 62% of employees apply what they learned immediately after training, 44% are still applying it at six months, and 34% after a year. The decay is the headline. A workshop that changes Tuesday but not November is an expensive way to feel productive in Tuesday's feedback forms.
(You may have heard a grimmer number: "only 10% of training transfers." It's folklore. It traces back to a 1982 opinion estimate, not data, and it deserves retirement. The real, measured picture is the 62/44/34 decay above: not catastrophic, not good enough, and very fixable.)
The decay isn't mysterious. Memory research has shown for over a century that unreinforced learning fades fast, and that single massed doses of anything are the weakest way to learn it: a meta-analysis spanning 14,000+ participants found spaced practice beat the one-big-session approach 47.3% to 36.7% on later recall. A one-off writing workshop with no follow-up is, structurally, a cram session. We say this as people who are sometimes asked to deliver exactly that, and who have learned to talk clients out of it.
The case for
So why does anyone bother? Because the skill in question is unusually valuable and unusually trainable.
Writing is what the College Board's survey of business leaders called a "threshold skill" for hiring and promotion: two-thirds of salaried employees at large companies have writing responsibilities, and US firms spend an estimated US$3.1 billion a year remediating writing after the fact. Meanwhile 81% of businesspeople say poorly written material wastes their time. The demand side of the question isn't in doubt: bad workplace writing is a tax everyone pays, and writing, unlike charisma, responds to instruction. There are concrete, learnable techniques (front-loading, sentence length, active voice, structure) with immediate, visible effects on a real document. Few professional skills offer such a short distance between "learned it after morning tea" and "used it in this afternoon's email".
The question was never whether writing can be taught. It's whether a workshop is built so the teaching survives contact with the workplace.
What separates workshops that work
Four ingredients, each one tied to the evidence above:
1. Participants work on their own documents. Not exercises about imaginary memos: the actual report someone is dreading. Transfer is hardest when the training context and the work context differ, so the cheapest fix is to remove the difference. The rewrite they leave with isn't an example. It's Tuesday's work, already done better.
2. Practice with feedback, not presentation. A workshop where the facilitator talks for six hours is a lecture with catering. The skill is built in the marking-up, the rewriting, the comparing of before-and-after, because retrieval and application, not re-exposure, are what cement learning.
3. Something happens afterwards. This is the spacing research turned into a service design: follow-up exercises, a refresher session, document feedback a month later, a tool that keeps scoring their writing when the facilitator is gone. Anything that turns one dose into several. The workshop is the start of the intervention, not the whole of it.
4. The boss is in the room, or at least on board. The fastest way to kill new writing habits is a manager who "fixes" plain language back into officialese. When leaders endorse the standard (better yet, attend), the workshop's Tuesday survives to November. Organisational support is the strongest lever in the transfer literature, and it costs nothing but a calendar invite.
So: do they work?
A one-off, generic, lecture-style workshop with no follow-up? The research predicts it fades within months, and the research is right. A workshop built on participants' real documents, heavy on practice, reinforced over time, with managers bought in? That's not a feel-good day out. That's a system for changing how an organisation writes, with each ingredient backed by some of the most replicated findings in learning science.
That's the version we run, which you already guessed. But don't take the barista's word for the coffee: ask anyone who attended a good writing workshop a year ago whether they still front-load their emails. The ones trained on real documents, with follow-up, will answer you in one short, active sentence. Which is the answer.