Skrip Video Business Writing Week 2

Welcome back.

We've covered the principles of good writing.
The things that you need to keep in mind every time that you create a document.
And we've talked a little bit about how much design really matters in
the impression that you make on your audience.
Now, we're going to get in to the nuts and balls of how your organize your
documents.
I can't emphasize enough how important good organization is to good writing.
[SOUND] You simply can't write well without it.
Good organization is easy.
It follows a formula.
I'm going to teach it to you.
You'll be able to apply it everywhere.
But it does take discipline.
You need to create a habit, and apply this to every document that you write.
Remember, Good organization can overcome poor writing.
Good writing can't over come poor organization.
>> Let me butt in here.
In graphic design, it's exactly the same way.
Designing without having some kind of a structure in mind,
first is like hanging pictures before you build the house.
It doesn't make sense.
It leads to total chaos.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're onto something here.
Because ultimately, what connects writing, design, and
public presentation, is the sense of organization.
And I think in a way, it comes down to kind of thinking in terms of a page.
Like the page is the space that you can live in.
And you have to organize that page so that you can live in it comfortably.
Yeah?
>> Yeah, and so that your audience can move about it comfortably as well.
Look at this website that I found years ago.
It's so poorly design, there's absolutely no sense of structure here.
It's as if someone was simply guessing.
>> Well, the problem is, though, when you write sentences,
you don't see them as quickly visually like that bad design but
if you're writing sentences and paragraphs that aren't well organized,
that's the exact same effect that you have on your audience.
>> And with design, it is obvious.
Look now at this website with just a bit of organization structure
introduced to it.
>> It's transformed.
>> It's a lot better, that's a lot better.
>> A hundred percent, it's a home run.
>> The principles that you're learning in our courses apply across the board.
You're going to feel more powerful, and clear, and
be able to really present yourself as the best possible professional.
And that's our goal.
Our goal is that your ideas will shine.
So many writers flounder around or
spend all their time writing really beautiful sentences.
The problem is, if you spend all your time writing beautiful sentences, and
you don't organize them well, they simply don't add up.
Play video starting at :2:23 and follow transcript2:23
If your audience can't find your main ideas or
follow your argument, it doesn't matter how well your sentences are written.
This module teaches you the hard and fast formula for
organizing your documents well and organizing your paragraphs well.
You have to put in the work to make it a habit.
To develop them and put them into your writing.
But the results of that effort will really path, because you're ideas and
you will really shine.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of organization, I want to spend a few
minutes here on revision and how it relates to organization and good writing.
Essentially, there is no good writing without good revision.
In fact, writing and revision are practically the same thing.
We'll cover revisions specifically in the final module of this course
when I'll teach you specific techniques you can use to edit your own
writing to create a masterful document.
In the lessons that follow, you'll begin to learn about things,
like starting with your purpose, creating strong topic sentences and
the importance of single idea paragraphs.
As you learn and practice remember, these are also self-editing tools.
Our goal is a highly polished, well structured document.
Play video starting at ::46 and follow transcript0:46
that's not necessarily how we start.
You have to revise to get there.
You want to continually adjust your writing and strengthen your use of good
organization to create a final document that is clean, clear and elegant.
The really important thing that you remember, the absolutely vital lesson in
this course, is that you don't have to start with a perfectly organized memo.
In fact, you probably won't, is that you revise so
that your final product has exactly what you need on a page.
It's really tight, it's really clear and
your reader knows exactly what you want to say.
>> Yeah, yeah, revision is important in public speaking as well in exactly that
formulation.
It's not that you know where you're going the first time.
It's that you go there and then in the process of revision, you come back and
straighten everything out and that will come forth in my course clearly.
That, that waste no time, get to the point but
revise the whole thing so that it's smooth.
>> In graphic design,
again it's uncanny how similar my field is to what you're talking about.
In design, revision is a fact of life, we're constantly revising.
And as I said before, we're reducing and
cooking things down til we get to that, absolutely, the essential message.
>> One lesson that I remember that you taught early in my course for me,
is that you could just take a single line away from a Panda.
And just by reducing the design by that little amount,
just makes it sing off the page.
It's really extraordinary.
>> It's very true and sometimes, oddly, the inverse of that is true, adding one
small thing changes everything as well, but it's knowing how to move lightly.
And as you say,
it's knowing what you're after clarity, brevity, and the message itself.
>> And until you've gotten to the end,
you can't know what steps get you there really.
You can't know if there's something you need to take out.
Or something you need actually to put in, a step of explanation or
a visual moment that then clarifies the whole thing collectively.
>> And part of your revision is how is my audience going to see this?
I get so close to it that I no longer see it clearly, but
I need to make certain that my audience is seeing what I want them to see.
We've identified the main point of our memo,

which is to propose a specialization to Coursera.
It turns out it was a little bit harder to get started maybe than we thought.
Because, like so many writers, I fell into the introduction trap.
But we took care of that,
because we're willing to cut things that don't fit our purpose.
Now, we need to get started really outlining our argument.
We need to know where we're going and
we have to carefully order the points that we want to make.
We're in the say it phase of our scaffold memo.
In our brainstorming session, William, Dave and
I came up with a lot of potential benefits that support our purpose here.
Each one of these can be a separate point in the pitch memo.
They include, employers want their employees to know how to write, design and
present.
Students will learn these skills, they'll have confidence in their abilities,
Coursera MOOCs are more popular than ever.
Our students will be able to present their best professional selves to their
audience.
There are concrete learning benefits to taking this course.
Finally, we believe that there's a market for the course.
I'm listing all of these in my outline in no particular order.
I can move things around in just a minute.
I'm already thinking that these points are the beginnings of my topic sentences for
my paragraphs that are going to follow.
So my outline looks something like this.
At this point, I take a step back to assess
the structure of the document that's emerging on my screen, and you should too.
I notice three things immediately, I have too many main points, I have something
that doesn't match my purpose, and I have similar ideas in more than one place.
This won't do, where are my problems?
Take a minute to look and see if you can find them and
then I'll let you know what I'm thinking.
First, what I did doesn't fit this memo.
There are no wrong or right answers.
Second, where do I repeat ideas?
Okay, let's see if we agree.
You might have different ideas than I do, and that's fine.
The point isn't to be right or
wrong, the point is to get to really tight structure in our final document.
There's more than one way to get there.
Okay, remember our rule of always write to your purpose?
Well, that's how I know I've done something wrong.
I need to make sure that every topic on my outline supports my purpose.
Do you see one point here that doesn't?
Here it is, the statement that Coursera MOOCs are more popular than ever
actually doesn't support my purpose at all.
It has nothing to do with the specialization.
So I need to cut it.
I've checked to make sure that every point I have on the page works towards my
purpose.
So now my second step is,
I need to make sure that I don't repeat any ideas in more than one place.
I see several opportunities to consolidate my points in short my memo.
And remember, short is better.
The first repetition I see is that the point about learning benefits and
the point about students want to learn these skills
are actually talking about the exact same thing.
So I'm going to put them in the same place in my memo.
I'm also going to shorten this bit to learning benefits,
just to keep it simple for now.
I also noticed that having confidence in their abilities, and students will be able
to present their best professional selves are really part of the same argument.
So I'm going to put them together too.
And I'm going to shorten this to best professional selves.
Same thing with employers want their employees to have these skills and
there's a market for the course.
I'm going to shorten this to market need.
By grouping similar ideas in the same paragraphs, I've narrowed down my
supporting paragraphs and my argument's main points to three key pieces.
Could I have organized this differently and fit things together differently?
Sure, I could have.
There's not one right answer to how to do this.
The key is that I did organize it.
And the way I put the points together builds a coherent argument.
The process is really key here.
Now I ask myself, have I started with my most important point first?
This is a judgement call on the writer's part, so
you need to decide what point is most important to you.
And then you need to stick with it.
As I look at my three possibilities, I think they're all important.
If they weren't important, I wouldn't have them on the page at all.
I want to be sure that my audience understands what I see
as the overarching benefit of this course, which is more than just writing,
designing and presenting well.
It's about presenting our best professional selves to the world
around us.
And it's about personal branding, isn't it?
That's the point I really want to get across, so
I'm going to make it my first body paragraph.
I think my next two points are pretty even in priority, but since this
is a business proposal my instinct tells me I should hit on the market need.
So I'm going to make that second.
Then, my third point will hit on the learning benefits.
Another reason I'm making this point last is that I think it's already embedded in
the title of the specialization, it's pretty obvious.
I don't want to trust the reader to understand it without my stating it, but
I also feel like the other two points need more work to get across.
So they should go first.
Now that I've sketched out my paragraph topics, I'm ready to go back and
fill in my introductory paragraph.
Argument 1 is best professional selves.
Argument 2 is market need.
And Argument 3 is students want to learn these skills,
which I've changed to learning benefits.
You can see, the introduction mirrors my body paragraphs exactly,
because it provides a preview of what's to come.
While this memo deals with pitching a specialization to Coursera, this process
of defining and organizing our main points will apply to any document that you write.
In the next video, I'll show you a process for outlining our individual paragraphs.
So as you know we're doing a course project.

And in my course we're going to write a memo.
And it's a pitch memo to Coursera and we're going to persuade them that they
need to publish a new specialization called Effective Communication.
So it's basically the specialization we're working on right now, right?
Okay, so I'm going to walk my students through how to outline it and
how to write it.
and what I'd like to do is brainstorm with you.
What do you think,
if we're trying to persuade Coursera to publish effective communication.
What are the things that you think I should put in my memo?
>> Specializations are more popular than ever.
>> That's true. >> Maybe that could go in.
I don't know.
>> Yeah, because we could ride the wave of Coursera success, right?
>> Could, could.
>> This specialization, okay.
>> Need.
>> Need, yeah.
Market need.
>> Market need.
>> I agree with that because I do know from my own research and
really that companies who often go back in and
spend money on new employees training them to write well.
So I really believe in that part of the course.
>> So maybe this is the heart of the memo that there are certain skills that we
can teach.
>> Good. >> And
clarity revision of message >> We may have
to work these out as you revise your own memo, but
they lead to a sense of self branding >> Yes.
>> Of self branding, right?
They lead to a sense of self presentation beyond just saying, well,
I'm presenting myself as William Cuskin, but
the William Cuskin is a little more than just William Cuskin, right?
It's a statement.
[LAUGH] Sorry about that.
>> [LAUGH] >> The other thing is that the three
pieces of our specialization, writing, design, and
presentation, they fit really well together.
I mean, I'm always amazed when we're brainstorming about our lecture
that what I'm teaching about writing is the same for design.
It's just a different medium or platform for
the way that you're expressing your ideas.
And so the principles Work all the way through.
I've been struck by that in many ways by Dave's contributions here because it
seems
to that there's a, I guess some terms would kick around before scaffolding or
Play video starting at :2: and follow transcript2:00
grid or formula that is common to what we're talking about.
>> Right.
>> And that that too, it's clarity, organization,
then it's authority, and all of it ties into revision.
>> Yes. >> Right?
>> Right. Absolutely.
Yeah. >> And
then the kind of sum total of that work >> is the brand of the south.
>> I think one other thing that our different
fields have in common is that people think these things are really hard.
That they think writing well is really, they go, well I really don't know.
I can't write.
I can't design.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> Speaking for designers, as a designer, I would have to say, it's not that hard.
>> [LAUGH] >> It's easier than people would think.
>> Yeah, this is a commonality between the three of us, too.
>> Absolutely, yeah. >> That,
though we note >> Many design flaws, and
much bad writing, and certainly we've sat through a number of bad presentations.
[LAUGH] It's actually not that hard to get to good.
>> No. >> It's not that hard to get to good.
>> Which is where you want to be when you start.
[LAUGH] >> Which is where you want to be.
>> Right. >> You do not want to start
>> Cause you can get from good to great.
You can get from good to great.
>> Yeah. [CROSSTALK] >> But, it's amazing how many people aren't willing to put
in
this small effort to get to great, to be great.
It's not that hard.
>> Well, and do you know, I think so many times, and
I've seen this with students designing something at the end of a semester.
It's a semester long project.
>> They feel that this glass part, the design part or that presentation part or
the riding part is an after thought.
>> Yes. >> I've done all this research,
I've done all field work >> Yeah.
>> This part of it doesn't matter that much whereas that's the shell that
surrounds everything they've done.
>> That's what everyone sees, right?
>> And that's what repels people of it's not, if it's not inviting.
>> That's right.
>> Yeah.
>> Good. I think you have a good memo.
At least some pink.
[LAUGH] Right in the. [CROSSTALK]
>> I think I have some work to do.
>> Yeah you have some work to do. [LAUGH] [CROSSTALK]
>> Yeah, you're the writer.
See you later.
>> I think I have some revision to do.
[LAUGH]
>> Okay, here's the deal.
You write it up I'll help you design it so
that it's beautiful.
>> Perfect, and then maybe you can do a presentation to Coursera from what we
say?
>> I'll do my best.
>> Okay. >> We'll make you look good.
>> Thanks. >> [LAUGH]
>> That is hard.
Okay, here I am with a blank screen staring me in the face and William and
Dave waiting to see what I come up with.
No pressure.
The American writer Ernest Hemingway famously coined the definition of courage
as grace under pressure.
Hemingway was also famous for death-defying outdoor escapades and
war adventures and his over the top machismo.
When an interviewer ask Hemingway what scared him most about all of this
life experiences, he said a blank sheet paper.
Sometimes getting started is the hardest part of all.
>> It's really true.
I know that beginning designers are actually paralyzed by that blank screen.
They sit there and they look and they wait for
great ideas to come in and great ideas are really, really fickle.
It's helpful to know that there's actually a process so that you can sit down and
go write to work as a designer, just as you were saying here, you can set down and
go to work using a process for good writing.
>> For writers we can consider what that's means to make
it easier by starting with your purpose.
>> [SOUND] >> No matter what you're writing about,
you want to start with your purpose and tell your reader exactly what that is.
And then that purpose informs everything that comes after it in your document.
Let's use our course memo as an example.
The purpose of the memo is to persuade Coursera
that they should publish a specialization on effective communication.
So I need to start with that purpose right up front.
That's what I do to get my outline started.
In fact, I draft that sentence and
it becomes the guiding light for everything that follows.
That statement of purpose also becomes a beacon for
everything else that comes after.
Everything in my final document has to work towards the goal stated in my
first sentence.
It's the lighthouse that we write towards.
So with that in mind, I'll begin with,
many business professionals find that they need better writing, design, and
presentation skills to showcase their ideas and advance their careers.
At the moment, I like that.
It's enough to get me started and start to fill up that terrifying blank page.
I think I'll build on it.
Employers agree that many employees lack these critical skills for
business success.
Coming right along.
This is easy.
Now I'm going to write, the time is right for
specialization that addresses these areas.
Okay, so here is my opening paragraph so far.
Actually this is failed opening.
Many of you have probably already noticed,
that I didn't follow my own rule I didn't start with my purpose.
>> [SOUND] >> And
I didn't describe what I'm writing about.
I certainly didn't do it in my first sentence.
Does many business professionals find that they need better writing,
design, and presentation skills to showcase their ideas and
advance their career, say anything about pitching a specialization to Coursera?
No, it doesn't.
I haven't started with my purpose.
When I say to start with your purpose and
describe what your writing about right away.
>> [SOUND] >> I mean start with your purpose and
describe what your writing about in your first sentences.
Many writer face the same temptations that I face here and succumb to them.
What did I do wrong?
I fell into the trap of justifying my purpose before I ever get there.
You don't need to do that.
You need to start with your purpose and
then you can build your justifications later in your document.
But I've wasted my reader's time with three unnecessary sentences.
So for instance, this very non-distinct point.
The time is right for a specialization that addresses these areas.
I hint at a new specialization, but I don't say it directly.
And I have two lines of vague text before I even get to my purpose.
The path of my writing looks like this, when I want it to look like this.
I want my readers to get from point A to point B
with the least amount of effort possible.
You don't want to fall into what I think of as the introduction trap.
Which is the compulsion that we all feel to ease into our topic.
If I'm going to follow the rules that I'm teaching you, then I have to be willing to
cut anything that doesn't start right away with our purpose.
This can be hard to do,
especially when we might like the sentences that we've written.
But you have to be willing to cut the things that don't fit our scaffold and
don't address your purpose.
And you have to be willing to do it mercilessly.
So I'm going to get started doing that right now.
Let's start again by opening the memo by getting directly to the point.
I'm going to leave my first version on the top of the screen so
that you can compare my process.
A good tool to use when you begin is to start with the words,
the purpose of this memo.
That forces you to stick to the point and jump right in.
Now is this maybe clunky?
Sure.
But remember, this is just a first draft.
I can go back and revise my first sentence after I've gotten started.
So here I go.
The purpose of this memo, remember, I might revise this later.
But the purpose if this memo is to propose a new specialization to Coursera on
communicating effectively with business writing, design, and presentation.
Boom, my audience knows exactly what they're going to be reading about as soon
as they start reading.
They'll also know exactly why I'm writing.
Compare these two openings.
You see how the second one gets right to the point?
I haven't wasted any time.
As we work through the process of outlining and
writing you'll also notice that I'm revising as I go.
In fact, you should always be revising.
It's a critical part of good writing that we'll talk about in depth
later in this course.
You also have to be willing to mercilessly cut anything that's not working.
So there goes my first attempt.
Off the page.
Always keep in mind that your reader's busy.
They have a really short attention span and you have to cater to it.
So you alway jump right in with your purpose and
you cut anything that doesn't feed it.
In just a little bit, we'll come back to the introduction and
we'll list the main ideas of our argument.
But first, we have some work to do.
We have to decide what the main points of our argument are and
we have to work on our topic sentences.
We're going to do that next, and then we're going to come back and
fill in our introduction with those points.
So, I'll see you in the next video!

present.
audience.
purpose.
Sure, I could have.
around us.

present.
audience.
purpose.
Sure, I could have.
around us.

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Welcome back.

We've identified the main point of our memo,

So as you know we're doing a course project.

We've identified the main point of our memo,

We've identified the main point of our memo,

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