About Us
For nearly twenty years, LandaBooks’ founders Lane Goddard and David Hatcher have provided communications training for dozens of government and private-industry clients. Their clients and participants have praised their lively delivery and substantial content—participant evaluations average better than 4.8 on a one-to-five scale.
Lane studied literature and writing back in school. But she was also the one everyone made fun of for storing her underwear in compartments, and keeping her socks matched up. Upon graduation, she found that her organizational and analytical skills were more in demand than her fiction.
Her day jobs have included designing work-flows, writing job procedures, analyzing training needs, and developing training programs.
As co-owner of LandaBooks, she has developed, written, and edited course materials, and designed and produced workbooks and visuals. And yes, she still writes fiction.
David is a writer and editor by training (bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English) and, most importantly, by experience.
Not only has he worked as a professional writer—his fiction and nonfiction have been published in leading newspapers and magazines—but he has supervised dozens of other professional wordsmiths, trained hundreds more to work with words, and developed training materials and concise guidebooks that have helped thousands of people improve their communication skills.
Some of the Courses We’ve Designed and Taught
- Advanced Style Practices
- The Business of Writing: A Step-by-Step Approach to Writing at Work
- Effective Briefings
- English Refresher
- Professionally Speaking: Dialect, Diction, and Delivery
- Proofreading, Editing, and Grammar
- Report Writing
- Words at Work: Building a Better Vocabulary
- Words at Work II: Refining Your Vocabulary
- Writing About Technical Subjects
- Writing Foundations I: Basics of Punctuation & Grammar
- Writing Foundations II: Choosing & Using Just the “Write” Word
Some of Our Publications
- The Landa List of Grammar Guidelines, Proofreading Principles, and Punctuation Practices by David Hatcher and Lane Goddard (1990, rev. 2000)
- The Dirty Thirty: Words Even Smart People Misuse by David Hatcher and Lane Goddard (2002)
- The Writing Process: A Step-by-Step Approach for Everyday Writers by David Hatcher and Lane Goddard (2005)
- Word Clusters: Build A Vocabulary That Works for You by David Hatcher and Lane Goddard (2005)
Education
Lane: B.A., Duke University; M.A., University of Florida;
Post-graduate studies, counseling and business administration.
David: B.A. and M.A., East Tennessee State University;
M.A., Indiana University.
About Our Associates
Dr. Kathleen Begley has taught writing to more than 10,000 people at Fortune
500 companies around the globe. She is the author of Writing Persuasively:
Getting Your Ideas Across in Business and Face-to-Face Communication: Making Human Connections in a Technology-Driven World. An award-winning journalist who writes a weekly newspaper column about business communication, she has worked with more than 10,000 students in writing classes. As part of her doctoral studies, she researched the most effective ways to teach writing to adults. Dr. Begley prides herself on designing and delivering training that is both informative and entertaining.
