Essential Techniques to be a Professional Writer

Course details

Do you want theskills to make your living as a professional writer? Or do you need to improveyour writing skills for the job you already have? Maybe you want to know how towrite a book, write articles and blog posts, want writing tips, or you do computertraining or web design. Whether you do online writing, proposal writing, grantwriting, create marketing ideas or just general business correspondence, yourwriting skills are important and there are many techniques you should know.

This course takesyou through the processes, grammar, business sense, compositions, stylisticchoices and software skills you need to be successful. We focus on businesswriting, and this course has special instruction for technical writing, but ifyou want to do creative writing — like write a short story or write a book —much of what's in here will apply to you, too. You will get straightforwardexplanations and exercises for rewriting bad prose into good.

Contentsand Overview

This course has over80 lectures and 1.5 hours of content. It's designed for you, regardless of yourexperience level, to develop skills in these areas:

• Planning a project
• Using grammarcorrectly
• Developing a writingstyle
• Creating rhythm
• Balancing short andlong sentence length and paragraph length
• Speaking with theappropriate tone for the situation
• Being conversationalwithout being colloquial
• Expressing criticismthe right way
• Eliminating clichés,unnecessary words and redundancies
• Balancing new wordsand obsolete ones
• Recognizingdifferences between commonly confused words
• Developingtechniques for technical writing
• Learning usefultools of the writing trade