Effective Writing: course description and goals
When it comes to communication, busy professionals face a
dilemma: the more you know, the more difficult it can be to communicate what you know
clearly and persuasively. As a professional, you acquire expertise in your field,
but that expertise can't do much good -- for you or for anyone else -- when it's just
sitting in your head. To share it with others, you need to organize your material,
structure your ideas, and frame your concepts in language that is both precise enough to
be accurate and direct enough to be clear. And you need to do all of this fast.
Effective Writing in Business and the Professions demonstrates the structures
of clear professional prose. You will learn not only how to diagnose and fix trouble
spots that can make writing unclear, but also how to refocus a text to reach different
audiences, such as colleagues, clients, or the general public.
How can you tailor your work to particular readers while working quickly enough to be
effective? Our course tackles this problem by using a "reader based"
approach to writing: you will learn to predict how readers will respond to language when
it is structured in particular ways. Before your readers can process the information
you wish to communicate, they need to see certain predictable kinds of sentence
structures, paragraph structures, and text structures.
In our first three sessions, we disentangle convoluted sentences taken from
real-world professional prose. We work to undo the damage done by sentences
that leave readers with no clue about who is doing what to whom -- a common problem in
professional writing. In the next two sessions, we focus on how to make clear
points within paragraphs: how to identify the most crucial piece of information
readers need within a paragraph, and how to position this information so that different
readers will be able to find it immediately, before they start wondering what the
paragraph is supposed to be about. Finally, in the last three sessions, we work on
how writers may use the introductions of texts not only to create a sense of coherence,
but to motive readers -- even readers who might initially be apathetic or resistant to the
text.
