Becoming a More Effective Writer: Clarity and Organization The Poynter Institute

Build the habits you need to organize your information better and write more clearly in this four-week online seminar.

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 will come away from this four-week, intensive online course with the tools you need to deliver what your audience wants.

By analyzing your own writing, you will learn how to turn facts and data into compelling stories, write with clarity and power, zero in on potential problems that can lead to fuzzy writing, and identify the pitfalls that keep you from writing concisely.

Over four weeks, you will learn the basics of good organization, various organization strategies, tips for writing more clearly, and tools for staying on track. Specifically, you will learn how to:

Recognize the difference between well-organized and poorly-organized writing

Use the ‘martini glass’ technique as an organizing tool

Use time as an organizing tool

“Box” information to make sense of complex or simple stories

Identify hurdles to good organization

Keep sentences simple

Identify flabby writing, passages that don’t support story focus, and unneeded background

Drive readers forward, not backward

Reduce distraction in your writing

Check your own work.