This course is for anyone who wants to tell powerful, clearly organized stories — on deadline. Whether you write breaking news alerts, meeting summaries, scientific papers or business plans, you’ll come away from this four-week, intensive online course with the tools you need to deliver what your audience wants.
Be prepared to analyze your own writing. We’ll provide plenty of short and long writing examples to understand the various writing tools taught in this seminar. But ultimately we want you to be able to apply them to your writing right away.
Much like a traditional class, this online group seminar has readings, assignments, due dates and discussions. No formal evaluations or grades are given, but participants are provided detailed and individual feedback. Here’s what you can expect over the four weeks of the course:
Week 1: Basics of Good Organization
- Why well-organized writing is not a random event
- How to use the ‘Martini glass’ technique as an organizing tool
- The power of time as an organizing tool
- How to ‘box’ information to make sense of complex or simple stories
- How questions and themes can provide the framework to deliver information simply and clearly
Week 2: Organization Strategies
- The value of clear story organization
- How to recognize the difference between well-organized and poorly-organized writing
- The hurdles to good organization
- Four strategies to organize information
Week 3: How to Write More Clearly
- Keeping sentences simple
- Red flags to be aware of
- Identify flabby writing
- Passages that don’t support story focus
- Unneeded background
- Using quotes
Week 4: Keeping Your Writing on Track
- Driving readers forward, not backward
- Reducing distractions in your writing
- “Embedding” information invisibly
- Ways to check your own work
