Gary Blake is director of The Communication Workshop, offering claims writing webinars and seminars to claims professionals throughout the US, Bermuda, Canada, and the UK. Blake is the author of The Elements of Business Writing (Pearson Education), used at more than 100 insurance companies. He has written about claims writing for a number of industry publications. His e-mail is garyblake725@gmail.com. The first spell-check system was developed by a group of six linguists from Georgetown University in the late 1970s for the mainframe computers produced by IBM corporation. If, however, you think that Microsoft Word’s Spell Check will alert you to …
In almost every writing skills seminar, there comes a moment in which a participant finds that one of the notions about writing that he or she has held since elementary school is either no longer valid or is dead wrong. …
By far, the trickiest punctuation mark in claims writing is the comma. There are eight comma rules, which we didn’t enjoy in high school, and knowing them will give a boost to every letter you write. Every day, thousands of …
Not long ago, a judge decided a bad faith lawsuit in favor of a plaintiff because the lack of a timely settlement could be traced back to the carrier’s not having any written claims procedures or guidelines in place. The …
As someone who teaches on-site seminars in “Effective Claims Writing,” I read hundreds of letters, memos, safety evaluation and site inspection reports, workers compensation evaluations, e-mail to brokers and loss control recommendations. Rarely do I see a document that completely …
I am delighted to be writing a twice-monthly column on claims writing for Claims Journal. This first column will lay out writing issues to be discussed, types of letters written by claims professional and claims areas – such as auto, …