A Crash Course in Copywriting: How to Write With Style, Flair & Impact

1. How to quickly become an exceptional writer: Being able to write better than most other people. It gives you a kind of Superpower. Superpower that helps you to advance more quickly in your career, or to grow your business more rapidly, or even to boost your influence on line. And a very warm welcome to you. My name is Shani Roger and I'm delighted to be your instructor and guide through this program. Now, for those of you who don't know me for more than 20 years, a professional journalist. And during that time, I had the opportunity to write for some of the world's biggest and best known news organizations. I'm talking about publications like The Economist, The Financial Times, Time magazine, dow Jones, and Bloomberg News to name a few. Right before I changed careers to become a writing instructor. I was an editor for The Wall Street Journal newspaper where I also trained dozens of reporters and editors. Now, as you'd expect, working for so long, for so many major news organizations gave me many insights into what it means to write. Well. And it's those insights that I'm going to be sharing with you in this program. As you can see, I've called this a crash course in writing. Well. And that's because this course is not only about turning you into a really good writer, it's about turning you into a really good writer. Very quickly. I promise you that the writing principles, strategies, and tactics in this course will help you to write just about any type of nonfiction with more style, flair and impact. I'm going to focus only on what is absolutely essential for turning you into an exceptional writer. So whether you're mainly interested in writing better business emails, work documents, press releases, academic research, sales copy, websites, scripts, news articles, blog posts, or content marketing. I'm confident that you're going to walk away from this course with some really powerful writing tools that will put you way ahead of your peers, colleagues, and competitors. Whatever field you may be in, whatever type of writing that you do. 2. The best editors on the planet: Now, for those of you who don't know me for more than 20 years, I was a professional journalist and during that time, I had the opportunity to write for some of the world's biggest and best known news organizations. I'm talking about publications like The Economist, The Financial Times, Business Insider, Time Magazine, dow Jones and Bloomberg News to name a few. Right before I changed careers to become a writing instructor. I was an editor for The Wall Street Journal newspaper where I also trained dozens of reporters and editors. Now, as you'd expect, working for so long, for so many major news organizations gave me many insights into what it means to write. Well. And it's those insights that I'm gonna be sharing with you in this program. In other words, I'm going to teach you how news writers and editors who work for leading news organizations perform the magic of writing captivating content every day for millions of readers. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to be a journalist or even aspiring journalists to benefit from this course. I promise you that the writing principles, strategies, and tactics in this course will help you to write just about any type of nonfiction with more style, flair and impact, including non-fiction books, work, e-mails, business plans, research papers, or blog posts. Now often say that being able to write better than most other people gives you a kind of Superpower. Superpower that helps you to advance more quickly in your career or to grow your business more rapidly, or even to boost your influence online. Indeed, once you acquire this power, you'll find it easy, really to stand out from the competition. Whether you're selling a product on your website, whether you're writing a persuasive email to a prospect or a press release on behalf of your company or resume for a job, or whether you're explaining to a client how some type of new software works. I've used my own above average writing skills to write riveting news stories for newspapers, to write glowing copy for blue-chip companies like Microsoft and PWC. And of course, on the landing pages of my own online courses where I've attracted hundreds of thousands of students through my copywriting. Now, if you're interested, just do a search online for the landing page of my course writing with flair, perhaps on the Udemy platform. And judge for yourself how persuasive the copy there is. Now, what I'm really trying to say here is the writing principles, strategies, and tactics that I'm going to teach you in this course. Really do work in practice. They will help you to write web copy, marketing material, e-commerce scripts, and so much more. Now in this course I'll be introducing you to some really powerful frameworks and formulas that are used consciously or unconsciously Bye the best news editors on the planet. And I have no doubt that these perspectives, once you learn them and incorporate them, will give you a writing, a power and beauty that's rarely seen in business, academic, or online writing. Okay, So here's how it will work in the coming lectures. I'm gonna give you not only some top-level mindset advice on writing, but also to powerful perspectives that will forever change the way that you write. Trust me when I say that these two perspectives are going to be a game changer when it comes to improving your writing really fast. And to get a taste of the power you're going to have once you imbibed these two powerful perspectives, I want you to just take a quick look at the following pretty ugly passage. Hey, Australia and pizza company, that is the, is the main, main franchise holder of the Domino's Pizza brand in Australia and New Zealand, France, Japan, and the Netherlands is planning to allow its customers in a world's first to track the journey of their pizzas on smartphones, table computers, and TV screens. The company is called Domino's Pizza enterprises. Everyone knows it can be frustrating for people who love eating pieces to wait for them to be delivered, but no more frustration. Now with this new app, you can see exactly where your delivery driver is on the journey to your home. So you will know how close you are to your first mouthful of pizza is the first time such a Services is available anywhere on the world planet. The company says that when you're hungry, but you know where your pizza is, people waiting will be more patient. In the delivery business. It's a dark spots, said the chief executive DON mage said in an interview, now it will be fully disclosed and transparent. Now I want you to think about how you might edit this rather ugly and messy passage to read more beautifully, just pause the video and read it through. I just want you to ponder how it might be improved. Okay, well, how did that go? Did you think of some ways to improve it even a little bit with the new superpower I'm gonna be giving you, you will almost certainly be able to rewrite this passage a lot more beautifully. Perhaps even as beautifully as this, for hungry pizza lovers waiting for a delivery can be a long and frustrating or deal. Now, on Australia and pizza company plans to make the torturers weight between placing your order and hearing the doorbell rings slightly less agonizing. Domino's Pizza enterprises, which holds the master franchise to Domino's brand in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, France, and the Netherlands. Said it would be the first company in the world to let customers to track their pizzas, journey to their doors on smartphones, tablets, and TV screens. The theory is that famished consumers will be more patient when aware of exactly how close they are to their first mouthful. In the delivery business. It's a dark spot. Chief executive DON message said in an interview, now it will be fully disclosed and transparent. That's an actual Wall Street Journal story in case you're wondering, now, are you interested in learning how to write with the same or similar type of style, flair and impact. If so, I look forward to seeing you on the other side. 3. How to write with style, flair and impact: At one time it was almost impossible to have a career as an author or a journalist unless you could persuade a newspaper or a publishing company to sign you up. Today, there's no such hurdle to getting your work published. Anyone can upload their books, articles, and opinion straight onto the Internet and have a decent shot at finding an audience. The online self-publishing revolution has already spawned hordes of successful online writers, including many independent journalists, political commentators, business mentors, and lifestyle gurus. The problem is that there's so much writing online these days that it's getting harder for writers to get their own content noticed. Now it's just as hard for purveyors of information of other kinds, say on behalf of companies, governments, or institutions to get their voices heard amid the rising cacophony of content that's competing for attention. But what if somebody gave you a secret weapon? What if someone taught you how to write with the style and flair of journalists on newspapers like The Economist or The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. How much more attention do you think your writing would get? How much more likable and shareable would it be? Now many of you, I'm sure we'll need no convincing that becoming a better writer is important. But how do you actually become one? A better writer? Now I won't deny that. It helps to be good at the technical stuff like grammar, spelling, punctuation, and so on. After all, rookie grammar or punctuation and spelling mistakes can make your writing look very amateur or not worth the effort of reading even but while technical proficiency is helpful in conveying authority and credibility on its own, it isn't enough to grab and hold the attention of increasingly demanding readers. Whether you're trying to write a viral blog post, sell something online or gain more positive press coverage for your company or the organization. The surest way to rise above the noise is to acquire a much rarer distinction, the ability to write with exquisite style. Now the techniques and tactics presented here in this course are designed to help you to do just that. But first, I know I have some work to do. I'll have to convince some of you that professional journalists like myself, the best people to learn writing from. So in the next lesson, I plan to start by showcasing some good or great journalistic writing. So join me in the next lesson to find out more. 4. Proof of the power of stylish writing: Now while I was a journalist, all I did all day everyday was write and write and write and later on as an editor, edit and edit and edit. And I'm doing this. My writing of course became significantly better with every month and year that passed. Now during that time with a lot of experience and a lot of mentoring as well, I naturally became aware of many advanced writing strategies and techniques that are unfamiliar to most people outside of the journalism profession, including people in government, the business world, and in academia. So in this lesson, I want to begin by showcasing some examples of what I consider to be journalistic flare, so that you'll be able to foresee what kind of impact the skills that I'm gonna be teaching you in this course are likely to have on your own writing ability. Now as you know that the main job of newspapers is really to inform readers of newsworthy events. And whether informing about business, finance, politics, science, or technology, the best news writers and editors discharge this responsibility with incredible finesse. Here, for example, is the economists bringing impressive clarity as well as a strong dose of enchantment to a scientific study that any academic paper, wood I'm sure treat a lot more dry, oily. Some lizards swim through sound as though it were water. Why? Aficionados of dune, Frank Herbert novel about a planet covered by Sahara Desert, will be familiar with the idea of animals that swim through sand. Giant worms, which do just that are a feature of the book. Back on Earth, though, there are sand swimmers to these ones are real. At least eight groups of lizards have a habit of diving headfirst into sand if it's available, and making paddling motions with their limbs to carry them below as if they were submerging themselves in a body of water. The question is why? Obvious hypotheses include evading predators and controlling body temperature. However, can Toyama of the University of Toronto has a third. The animals are ridding themselves of skin parasites and he has data to back is theory are. Now just think about how stylish and captivating that passage is, at least compared to the way most people in business or academia might write it. Now of course, I'm not saying that this particular breezy style of writing is going to be suitable for everything you write. But once you learn the techniques that go into producing such clear, graceful, and riveting copy U2 will have the power to craft your writing to a similar standard whenever you wish. The first, let's look at some more examples of exceptional journalistic writing. Now some of the best column in The Guardian, at least in the past, have produced some very enticing articles. Just take a look at this excerpt from a sharp witted writer called Charlie Brooker, whose prose, as demonstrated here in this evocative piece of British pre-election political coverage many years ago, rarely fails to elicit laugh. Variety is often described as the leader you'd most like to share a drink with. Which seems reasonable because at least if alcohol's involved, there's a chance you might forget the encounter. No need to resort to booze where some of the other leaders are involved. For instance, not only will any conversation with Cameron disappear from your mind, the moment it's over, his face will erase itself. For many selfies you took together, try to recall which issues you discussed in your vision will turn ash gray while a low rumbling noise like the churning of a mighty windowless machine room in the bowels of the earth will fill your mind softly at first, steadily growing until the volume becomes so overwhelming, your cranium begins to rupture from within. The Wall Street Journal's front page is another place where you can go to witness some outstanding journalistic writing, particularly as offbeat, a head column which is loved by readers for its wry humor as much as, for it's riveting plot lines. A heads strive to entertain as much as to inform and the journals report is usually relish the opportunity to write for the column because it gives them the chance to flex their creative muscles beyond what's normally permissible on their usual news beats. As you can see here. New Zealand's hip operation crew kicks it. Really old school. In the world of hip hop, violet policy is strictly old school and unabashedly so twice a week the New Zealander joins her friends practicing dance moves like voting and popping two beats from Missy Elliott and Nikki manage her clothes hot pink and fluorescent green leg warmers, a standard glove, and a black hoodie or modern. But Miss Hollis has a piece of blank that sets them apart from other hip hop dancers. A wheelchair. Also, she's 96 years old. Miss Hollis is part of the hip operation crew, a collective of 37 seniors from where Hickey island, off the east coast of New Zealand, near Oakland. It claims to be the world's oldest hip hop dance group. Miss Hollis or granny V, is the oldest of its members, although several others are in their 80s and 90s. Now, hip operation cruise on a mission to prove that age is no barrier to making a splash on the biggest stage, the world hip hop dance championships in Las Vegas. Now, you may encounter such enchanting pros and assume that it's authors had been born with a natural gift for writing that you unfortunately, it will always lack. The good news though, is that while it's true that some writers are naturally more gifted and talented than others. They don't in fact, possess some sort of mystical ability that is somehow forever beyond your reach. As you'll see in the coming lectures with the right mindset strategies and tactics, YouTube can learn to write with the same or a similar type of style and flare. The style and flare of the best journalist on the planet. And perhaps a lot faster than you might even think. 5. You, too, can be a standout writer: After witnessing the glowing journalistic writing that I demonstrated to you in the last lesson, you may be wondering, can I ever really write as well as those accomplished news editors and writers? To do so don't you have to have somewhat of a natural ability to write well, now it's true that some people do have a natural talent for playing basketball, or for dancing, or for swimming, or for ice skating or whatever. Likewise, there are people out there who are naturally good writers. And such people do have an advantage. By the way, if you're one of those people with a natural flair for writing, I'm sure U2 will benefit from learning the writing strategies of people like myself. We've been practicing the craft for a long time. But what about people who don't have this natural ability to write? Well, maybe you're one of those people who don t think of yourself as having a natural gift for writing. Well, don't worry. The methods that I'm gonna be teaching in this course, we will take your writing to a level of proficiency and professionalism that will very likely outshine, that have most people in your field. Indeed, what I'll share with you in the coming lectures is as close as you will ever get to a science of good nonfiction writing. That is, you get a bunch of rules, formulas, frameworks, and principles that you can apply very effectively to your own writing, these strategies, they will work. But I also want you to keep in mind that there's also an art to writing, which is a bit harder to teach than the science. The artistic component of writing is related more to the feelings than to the intellect. It's not about the rules per se, but about the way you're writing feels to you, as well as how you believe it will feel to others. That's why I'll be encouraging you throughout this to try to develop this artistic instinct. And I'll be giving you ideas about how to do that as we go along. You want to develop your own instinct for when say a particular tone or a particular turn of phrase, or a particular word, or a particular punctuation mark feels wrong or conversely, feels just right. A certain idea can be expressed, you see in so many different ways in the form of the sentence with different punctuation, with a different rhythm, a different structure, and in various different voices. But they'll come a point when you'll have to decide which of those choices before you is best. The answer won't always lie in some textbook or a rule that loot you've learned here. That's why I encourage you right from the beginning of this journey to practice feeling your way through a piece of writing or a sentence or word. As much as you might think about these things logically, you'll find that other people will often agree with your choices, but occasionally they want, and as long as you're not being too outlandish or off track or disrespectful of rules. That's okay. Okay, So now you've understood hopefully that good writing is both an art and a science. And it is very possible as well for you to become an exceptional writer. Now it's time for me to give you an idea of where we're going to go in this course so that you can prepare yourself for what I hope will be a thrilling ride ahead. 6. A glimpse of the road ahead: We saw recently how powerful good journalistic writing can be at informing, persuading, and entertaining readers. And now it's time to start getting into the guts of this program. And I want to begin by explaining exactly how this course is designed to transform you into an exceptional writer very quickly. Basically, this program is broken down into three parts. First, in the section that immediately follows this one, I'll introduce you to the unique mindset of exceptional nonfiction writers. Here you'll learn some powerful attitudes, beliefs, and values for the shared just about by all good non-fiction writers and that unnecessary for you in order to make your writing exceptional too. After that, I'll teach you the first of the powerful writing perspectives, one that I call the secret source of good writing. And in that section, we'll explore the four ingredients of exceptional writing, which are namely simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. You'll learn that these are the only four ingredients you will need to add to your writing in order to make it sparkle and shine. In this section, after that, I'll introduce you to another powerful writing perspective, one that I regularly used to edit the writing of others including Wall Street Journal reporter's. This editing perspective will take your writing to an even higher level by breaking writing down into four dimensions, namely, content, structure, style, and presentation. Now, this is another critical perspective for you to know. Once you've thoroughly understood and imbibed the mindset of elite writers plus these two powerful writing frameworks that I mentioned. You'll know how the best journalistic writers do their magic. So if you're ready, let's start by learning the core mindset. People who can write exceptionally well in the fields of journalism, publishing, marketing, advertising, and online copywriting. Now before we do that, I understand that some of you may be impatient to get to the writing tactics and techniques immediately. But trust me, this mindset stuff in the next section is vital to have as a foundation for writing with immaculate style. So I advise you not to skip it. I'll see you then on the other side. 7. My own journey to writing mastery: While I was at school, I was convinced that I was already a brilliant writer. I suppose it's not all that surprising when as a child, my teachers would often praise my writing ability. I'd hand in an essay, for instance, and the teachers would gush over my dissection of complex ideas or they would wax lyrical about an elegant turn of phrase that had happened to write in a short story later in college, I think I was seen as one of the better writers in my subject international relations, which is an especially writing heavy subject. Now with these sorts of experiences at school and college, it was easy to understand how I would have begun to see myself as a pretty decent writer. And it helped as well that I absolutely loved writing. Which is why after graduating, I decided to capitalize on what I believed were my above-average writing skills and become a journalist. My plan was one day to write for a major British newspapers such as the Times or the Guardian or The Economist or financial times. However, it didn't take long for me to discover that I was nowhere near as good a writer as I had presumed that I was. My first proper job in journalism was as a report on a couple of trade journals, business titles that covered the telecoms industry, right, about the latest phones launched in this or that country, or some new tariff that a phone company had introduced. Now on my first day in the job, I thought I'd try to really impress my editors by submitting a really well-written story. To my surprise, however, my story was returned to me with lots of questions, comments, and most discouraging of all changes. It turned out that my news editors, while not quibbling with the substance of my article, didn't care too much for my use of formal academic language to tell much of the story. Neither did they appreciate my use of rather elaborate sentences, the type that I perfected in college essays for which I'd usually gotten good grades. As I poured over through the story that I'd submitted during the so-called read back that the editors offered reporters. It seemed to me that my editor had pretty much torn apart what I'd written and then stitched it back together to read completely differently. It was nothing like the way I've written it, gone with a fancy and flowery words that I'd proudly inserted. They'd been replaced with planar, familiar. So the language, my elaborate sentences which I had thought would display sophistication to our audience of high-profile industry executives had been flattened out to forge instead a series of bluntly straightforward points that even a child could understand. Some sentences were clipped to appear less worthy. Others had been stretched to give the writing are completely different pace and rhythm. Several paragraphs had been removed altogether while others had been exiled to a different part of the story. In short, the article I was reading now was entirely different from the one that I proudly submitted just a few hours earlier. Needless to say, this hurt my ego. Radical reworking of my article was a rude awakening for me, but also it was upsetting to my perception of myself as an exceptional writer. In fact, the experience made me doubt whether I was any good of a writer at all. Once I've gotten over the pain, however, I force myself to look at the situation objectively. And I soon appreciated that my editors were actually making my articles read a whole lot better. And very soon I began to see these experienced news editors of this type as having a rare hidden talent and being aware almost of a secret science that most people outside the journalism profession had little or no idea about. Knowledge of this science, I thought gave these editors are huge advantage not only in breaking down the ideas they wanted to express to their audience, but also in communicating those ideas brilliantly. In that moment of realization, I decided to make it my mission to figure out how great journalistic writers like those editors did what they did. So that one day I could become an exceptional news writer as well. The lectures in this section are designed to introduce you to the unique mindset of excellent news writers and editors of the sort that I've had the honor to work with and learn from over my two decades long career as a journalist. As we proceed, you'll discover many things about the way they think and the way they operate, the questions that occupy their waking thoughts, the values and aspirations that they hold dear, and the habits and practices that they cultivate. I urge you to study this section closely, even though it's more about mindset than it is about tactics. And we'll begin by addressing what I think is the most fundamental question that a good writer ask themselves every time they sit down to write by the consciously or subconsciously. And it's this question. Do I really have something worth saying? 8. Do you truly have something worth saying?: What do you intend to write next? A blog post, a news article, a job application, and official government report, a press release, and online product description. Whether you yearn to become a major influencer or just someone who wants to promote your business or your product more effectively. You're here because you understand that you need to be able to write excellent copy if you want lasting success. Now every writer has to start somewhere and the best writers start by asking themselves a fundamentally important question. It's a question that some of you may sound too obvious even to be worth mentioning, but it's still an important one. And the question is this, do I actually have something worth saying? Why is it so important this question? Because nothing you ever write will have any impact unless it has some true value to your intended audience. So before writing anything, run this simple test. Ask yourself genuinely whether what you're about to write will be truly worthwhile to your target readers. If you can try to state explicitly in writing in what sense it will be worthwhile. Trust me, you will save yourself a lot of wasted ink if you do this at the beginning of any writing endeavor, at least at the start when you're beginning. Try to improve your writing. After all, you don't want to get to the end of your text and get that down hearted feeling that the whole enterprise may not have been worth the effort because you didn't really have something that was truly worth saying. Now, if you're writing a job application, for instance, you'll intrinsically know that what you're writing will be worthwhile because you know that you're seeking to sell your talent and skills to a potential employer and thus lambda job, the thing you're writing therefore, obviously has tremendous value. But what about a random blog post or an email that you're thinking of writing to a client? Are you really sure that you have something worth saying to your reader or readers? Something that will engage them, that will have value, that will benefit them in some way. If you can't honestly hand on heart answer yes to this fundamental question, you may be fighting an endless losing battle. You might even struggled to find the motivation to write. And even if you do so, your words will never amount to much. Now don't be disheartened if the initial answer to this question is negative. The question itself will force you and guide you to think up something that does have value. In other words, the return on investment of asking this particular question is quite considerable. Now this question is so important because if there's nothing of intrinsic value to your audience at its core, then as much as you might try to dress it up with the techniques and strategies that I'm going to be teaching you later in this course, you'll find that you're merely putting lipstick on a pig. No offense to pigs, but the writing will never be truly beautiful if it has no intrinsic value. That's why you need to ask how, what your writing will benefit your potential readers and make sure you can return a very persuasive answer, then you'll know you're on strong foundations. The exception to this is when you're writing simply to brainstorm until a good idea jumps out at you. And that of course, is a perfectly fine thing to do. I'm sure all of you who've occasionally read some mindless clickbait where the writing doesn't really deliver anything of value. Initially, it may get lots of hits, but has a piece of writing, it's unlikely to be influential or widely shared if it doesn't have some intrinsic value to the readers. While people might be tricked into reading you the first time, they won't trust you enough to keep on reading you long into the future, which is what you hopefully want. Now, you'll have lost their confidence and then they'll begin to tune you out. Armed with a positive answer to this question, Is this worthwhile? You can reasonably expect that your writing will provide value and thus create engagement. In other words, you won't be just writing for yourself. Once you've answered yes to this fundamental question, Is this worthwhile? You can proceed to the next important question that an elite writer ask themselves. The question is this, what is my purpose in writing this? There's a subtle but important difference between these two questions. And in the next lesson, I'll reveal to you exactly what that difference is. 9. The importance of defining your purpose: In the previous lesson, we saw why it's important to write something only when you can say hand on your heart that what you have to say is worthwhile to your anticipated readers. Once you're satisfied that what you're writing will have value to your readers. You'll need to shift the perspective and begin to look at what you rather than your readers will gain from writing it. You do this simply by being clear on your purpose. By understanding why you're writing this particular text. Whether you're composing website copy, some content marketing, a technical manual, some kind of official communication or anything else. Being clear on your purpose will help make sure that what you're writing is impactful. But that's not all being clear on your purpose. Ideally, even before you begin writing something will also give you many insights into how to design and shape the piece itself, which will make the whole process of writing it much easier. Now when I say, you need to get clear on your purpose whenever writing, there are essentially two components to purpose that you need to think about. The first component of purposes, what I call your intention. And the second component is your audience, is by putting these two things together, your intention and your audience, that the magic really happens. Here's how to remember this powerful formula. Purpose equals intention plus audience. Let's start with the first component of purpose, your intention. Now, there are many different types of intention that you may have when writing something, but here are six of the most common intentions that I've come across. Your main intention may be to inform readers of something as a news article might do. Second, your main intention may be to persuade your readers of something, as is the case, we'd say sales copy on a website where you're basically trying to convince people to purchase your product. You want to persuade them to buy from you. Third, your main intention may be to entertain your readers. As might be the case in a funny blog post, you write simply to make your readers laugh and enjoy themselves. Fourthly, your intention may be chiefly to inspire, motivate your readers, as say, in a fitness blog, where you want to motivate them to perhaps work out daily. Fifth, your intention may be chiefly to educate your readers about something. Has, it's usually the case in a school textbook, say that covers World War II. You're writing to contribute there, to read as knowledge of a subject. And finally, your intention may be to transform your readers in some particular way. As in, for example, a self-help book that purports to turn readers into successful entrepreneurs. Now, some of those intentions could overlap, and there are a few other intentions that you might be able to think of. But this basic framework of six intentions appears to fit the majority of the writing that I've personally encountered. Now to be sure, you often will have more than one intention when writing something. For instance, consider this made-up political poster. Sally Smith has been fighting for you since 2010. If you want lower taxes and a better life vote. Sally Smith, this short text is aimed at informing, persuading, and motivating all three of those things at once. But even in such cases, there is usually one primary intention at work. And what do you think that is in this case? Well, I think the most likely intention here is to motivate people to vote for Sally Smith, which is what the informing and persuading or ultimately also geared towards. Now, why is being clear on your, on your primary intention. So important? Most importantly, knowing your main intention helps you to better choose your content. Say you're writing a blog post where the intention you have is both to inform your audience about the best stocks to buy, but also to entertain them at the same time. Well, in that case, it would help you enormously to be clear on which is your primary intention there to inform or to entertain. If it's to inform, you can make sure the entertainment aspect never overshadows or outweighs the informing aspect, but instead helpfully supports it. In other words, you won't be able to balance the two of these intentions appropriate unless you're really clear on what your primary intention is. So in this particular example, in order to help shape your content, you might ask yourself the following question. Am I seeking to inform readers in an entertaining way? Or am I seeking to entertain readers in an informative way? The results in n may look quite similar, but they'll also be subtle and often crucial differences in the way you frame and communicate your message as a result of making that fine distinction about your intentions. So that covers the importance of defining your intentions upfront. Do you remember what I said was the second component of your purpose? That's right, your audience. Now what I mean is that in order to get the best results in your writing, you need to match up your intention with the audience that you're writing. For. That way, you'll be able to form a clearly defined purpose. Let me explain what I mean. As writers, we're always writing for someone, right? Even if it's just for yourself. Therefore, you'll find that by being very specific about who that someone is, at least in your own mind, your greatly improve your communication with them. You'll address them in the right way. You will speak to them in a way that best keeps their attention. You use the appropriate language and you'll adopt a suitable pace, and so on, things like that. Now, your audience could be any of the following. For example, it could be European business people. They could be Chinese or Indian, or British expatriates. They could be conservatives or they could be liberals. They could be aspiring entrepreneurs, or they could be young professionals or cryptocurrency traders, and so on. Of course, there are so many different audiences that you could be writing for, but you'll find the more precise and specific that you can be about both your intention and your audience. The more deeply you'll be able to connect with the exact people that you're aiming to write for when it comes to the content. Being clear on your purpose will also give you a whole lot of clarity in terms of what to say, what not to say, how much of it to say, what to emphasize, what to elaborate on, how to illustrate your point, what information to provide as contexts, and so on. Clearly defining your intention and audience before you write something will also help to decide the right tone, the right pace, and the right rhythm for the writing. Now it can be really helpful to actually write down your intention and audience explicitly to guide you as you're writing like this. My intention in this cover letter is to persuade the boss of Widget, inc. To invite me for a job interview. My intention in this article is to inform the general public of the dangers of eating red meat. My intention in this product description is to get more type of buyers or whatever else it is that you're trying to achieve in terms of both your intention and your audience. I want you to notice how in these examples, both your intention and your audience are explicitly stated. And doing this will ensure that your content takes on exactly the shape and form that is needed to fulfill your purpose. It's like creating the right vessel for your content to be poured into. Now that we've understood the importance of clarifying and defining our purpose, even before we begin to write something, I want to introduce you to another key aspect of an elite writers mindset. You see exceptional writers approached their content with a particular set of aspirations in mind. Five, in fact, that I've managed to delineate these aspirations, help them make their writing stand out. And I'll reveal those five aspirations to you in the next lesson. 10. The five aspirations of an elite copywriter: In the last lesson, I explained why it's very important to be super clear about your purpose whenever writing anything. In this lesson, I'm going to go a little deeper into the mindset of elite writers. And I want to explain to you what I see as the five common basic aspirations that exceptional writer's share. Once you learn these five aspirations, I urge you to embed them each into your own consciousness. When you write with these five aspirations in mind, you'll find that it becomes much easier to craft your copy. Well, every time here then are the five aspirations of a superior copywriter that you should think about adopting immediately. First, always strive to ensure your writing is easy to comprehend. In other words, try to make sure that everything you put down on the page will make perfect sense to your readers. What that means is trolling through every paragraph, every sentence, every word, and every punctuation mark to make sure that your meaning shines through crisply from start to finish. So that's the first aspiration of a great copywriter to ensure your writing is always easily comprehensible. Secondly, strive to make your writing beautiful. You see a superior writer goes beyond just trying to make their writing easy to understand. They also strive to make it read beautifully, which means they strive to create a highly enjoyable reading experience. I've found that it's only when you write with this aim in mind of creating a beautiful piece of writing that your prose can really begin to take off. It helps when you begin looking at your writing through the lens of an artist rather than as a hack, as this will have huge ramifications for how it turns out. Now, although I hear you saying that beauty can often be subjective, having this aspiration to create something of beauty will give you a totally different feeling and perspective whenever approaching or writing or editing project, it can really help to think of yourself as an artist who is approaching a sculpture or a painting and trying to create something beautiful by constantly refining your content, say with skillful brushstrokes. That's how I would approach an article when I was editing for various big news organizations, I'd see this Canvas before me and I'd go to work on creating, as I saw it, a work of art, a chisel away at a reporters copy Cpk seeking to make it more and more beautiful with each of my edits until I felt satisfied that it had reached the pinnacle. Its own inherent potential for beauty, of course, within the limits of a strict publishing deadline usually. But I want you to trust me that focusing on creating something of beauty, even if all your writing is a quick email to your colleagues or an invite to a party. It can make a real difference to how you're writing. Turns out, go ahead and try it. If you don't believe me, you'll see just how much it contributes to making your writing sparkle. Okay, the next thing you should strive for as an exceptional writer is for your copy, as well as being easily comprehensible and beautiful, as we said, is for it to be effective. And by effective, I mean effective in terms of simply achieving the purpose for which it's being written. Remember purpose, cumulative power of having, on the one hand, a clear intention, and on the other hand, being acutely aware of the audience towards whom that intention is directed. Whether your purpose is to prove your suitability for a job interview through the vehicle of your resume and cover letter, or merely to persuade a prospect or client to meet you for coffee, or whether you're pitching to investors for investment in your startup. Always keep in mind that an effective piece of writing is simply one that does a good job of achieving exactly what you want it to achieve. So make sure you carry this aspiration to ensure your writing is effective. That is with you at all times when writing. The fourth aspiration that most great writers I know have is that they strive to make their writing engaging. How do they make it engaging? Well, if you truly want your writing to engage readers, you have to really care for them. And I mean, caring deeply for them. But more specifically, you have to care about connecting with them. In fact, the more intensely you can bring yourself to care for your readers while writing, the stronger this connection you make with them will be. In other words, don't just bash out words and sentences one after another, hoping that somehow your readers will feel that you're writing for them specifically. You have to make the effort to communicate intimately with them every step, the way in every paragraph, sentence, and every word. If you're composing an email to one of your clients, then try to feel their presence as you write. Make sure you're writing with them in both your mind and in your heart. Since the engagement level with what you're writing, imagine their reaction to certain turns of phrase and get excited about it. Think about what might confuse them and what might not confuse them. You will soon come to appreciate that a lot of amateurish writing comes across as mechanical and one-dimensional precisely because it lacks this concern for connecting intimately with one's intended audience. And as a result, it's just not engaging enough. Now while all this may sound a little airy fairy, this quality of caring is actually what takes you right into another level. Completely. Caring for your readers will ensure that you communicate with the right type of content, the right type of words, the appropriate tone, and the perfect pace that secures and maximizes the engagement. Finally, exceptional writers strive to make their writing authentic unless they're in the business of deceiving. And to be fair, some are the best writers don't just go about using big fancy words to try to make themselves sound smart or intelligent. They don't make their sentences weirdly convoluted and long, just to appear sophisticated. An exceptional writer, except in rare cases, strives to make their writing sincere and straightforward because that creates, again, better engagement, whether composing an email to clients, a blog post or a PhD thesis. And exceptional writer's goal is not to impress readers with fancy words and sentences, is to communicate with them in the best possible way. Adopting this approach to your writing will help to eliminate all pretentiousness from it, including any unnecessarily pompous words and complicated sentences that can get in the way of genuine communication. I call it being real, instead of trying to be Royal. And it's an approach that I think will serve you well. So those are what I see as the five core aspirations of an exceptional copywriter. Always strive to make your writing comprehensible, beautiful, effective, engaging, and authentic. Okay, up next, we're going to discuss another critical aspect of the superior writers mindset, a keen awareness of tone and content. You see most writers know what to say. In other words, they are on top of their content. The best ones also know the best way to say it by understanding the concept of time. As you'll soon discover for yourself. 11. The two keys to effective communication: In the last lesson, we learned that a good writer usually has five key aspirations, namely to ensure that their writing is comprehensible, beautiful, effective, engaging, and authentic. Hopefully you've now also made those five aspirations are part of your own writing mindset. Now in this lecture, I want to give you another piece of mindset advice. I want to suggest that you begin to look at anything you're writing as having two key components, content and tone. I'll try to explain the difference with a story. Someone I knew once told me they found it really hard to write work e-mails. Why? I asked. I don't know, I just get stuck. The person said, I never know what to write. Now women do when we delve deeper into it, I realized that writing even as simple work email to colleagues can be quite hard for some people. I realize it can help when you begin to understand though, that these two features of written communication, namely content and tone. After all, content and tone applied to just about any type of writing you're doing. And indeed speaking in a way, they're the two most fundamental aspects of your writing. Because whenever writing something, you're always having to consider what you say, that is your content. And secondly, how you say it. And that is what we mean by tone. If you can get these two things right, you'll often end up with basically a decent enough piece of writing. Therefore, it's really important to understand the difference as well as the connectedness of content. And turn back to the story of my friend. I asked him to give me an example of the type of email that he might wish to write so I could help him with his problem. He told me he really struggled, for instance, with an email where say he had to say goodbye to colleagues when he was leaving the company to go to another job. So I said, Okay, and I suggested he considered this farewell email fundamentally in terms of the two qualities and components I already mentioned, content and tone in order to help him get to grips with it better than I asked, what would be your purpose in writing this email to inform, persuade, inspire, educate, and entertain, transform. My friend told me that his purpose in the email would mainly be to inspire his colleagues to think well of him and perhaps to stay in touch even after he leaves. I said, Okay, you want mainly to inspire. Now, remember that the email would perhaps also have a secondary intention, which would be to inform colleagues of where he was going and perhaps details of the job that he was going to be doing and stuff like that and maybe even to do it in an entertaining way. Now, as I said in a previous lesson, being clear on one's purpose is really what opens the way to understanding the appropriate content for the texts that you wish to write. When I asked him what were the specific things he wanted to say in his e-mail? The ideas came swiftly and easily. Now to his mind, he provided list. He'd want to say to his colleagues in the goodbye email that he was leaving the company. Also that he'd enjoyed his time working with them, that he'd hoped they'd stay in touch. Obviously, that he'd be happy to continue to help them with anything they needed. He'd want to inform them, of course, where he was going and what he'd been doing at the new place. That would essentially be the type of content that he'd had. Then I suggested the way forward would be decide on the best order in which to say those five or six things that you mentioned. In terms of content alone, the email might look something like this. I'm leaving the company. I'll be starting my new job at an IT startup company down the road. The new company is located not far away, only about two miles from his office. I'll still be analyzing sales data like I did in my current job. I've enjoyed working with you at all and I feel sad to be leaving. I hope you'll stay in touch with me. You're welcome to call me up and asked for help even after I leave. Okay. Well, that's all fine. As far as the content goes in it it does the job, but it's missing something, right? It's missing tone. It's just made up of bare bones statements one after another, stating fact after fact. To make the writing more personable and engaging in. Something doesn't mean it's this quality called tongue. Try to give the writing some tone perhaps by adding or tweaking a few words and sentences and using maybe different punctuation to help you. The aim of this exercise is to help you to easily distinguish the components of content and tone so that you can have more leverage over the style of your writing. Okay, well, here's how one might at a bare minimum, inject just a little bit of tone into the email with a heavy heart that I announced my last week here. Why didn't I tell you sooner will get me drunk enough on Friday and I'll reveal all for the curious among you. I'm gonna be working at an IT startup just down the road. Since I'll be only two miles away from here, you have no excuse not to invite me to lunch now and again, my role at the company will be much the same as here. I'll still be analyzing sales data. That is, assuming the company makes sales. I just wanted to take this opportunity to declare that I've enjoyed working with you all so very much. And then I'm incredibly sad to be saying goodbye to so many fine people. Keep me informed of all the glass, it won't you? In fact, I insist you call me at least once a week to ask for my help, even if you don't genuinely need it. Farewell my lovely. Now that you have content and tone working together in one type of way to create more impact than a bunch of bare-bones sentences. Again, you have there a combination of what you want to say, the content and how you want to say the tone. Now when you look at your writing in this way, you'll find that you can more easily compile effective pieces of written communication. So I hope you'll take this lesson to heart. Needless to say, the same considerations would apply if you are writing a more serious type of business e-mail, say you wanted to get a colleague to send you some data so that you could complete a monthly report to your boss. And that this colleague was always late in providing with this data, which also makes you late, also makes your boss angry with you. Well, the raw content of your email might look like this. You are late again in providing your monthly stats. Please send the stats to me so I can compile my monthly report. My boss is on my back again because I'm always late to to your slowness. Now you can add whatever tone you want to. Those raw facts potentially leading to different impacts. And here's one type of tone. My boss is on my back because you're late again with your stats. Please send the data asap. Nobody else in the team seems to have trouble doing this. Now, saying it like that would create one type of impact. Whereas this way of saying it would create a different type of impact using the same basic information. Going to need you to submit your data as soon as possible. My friend is late again, sorry to rush you, but the boss is on my back. Same content, completely different tone and a completely different impact due to the way the language and the punctuation is diploid. Now when you're able to differentiate content and tone, you'll find that you're much better able to craft your written communication to be more effective. So it's definitely something you want to look into an experiment with. Now I want you to know that the exact same principle, paying attention to tone and content individually could apply to just about any type of nonfiction writing you do a blog post, for instance, we usually skillfully combine content with tone to create the exact vibe that you want to create for your readers. Do you want to write sharply, forcefully and unapologetically? Or do you prefer a tone of humility, compassion, and sensitivity? What I'm saying really is that you want to always give equal attention to both the content and the tone of your writing and shape them to work together beautifully. Okay, so now that we've understood the respective importance of tone and content, I want to turn to look at content in more detail. You see whether you're writing an email to colleagues or a news article. There are different categories of content that occur. And it helps to know what those are so that you can design and craft your writing more effectively. I'll show you precisely what I mean in the next lesson. 12. The anatomy of content: When I was a journalist, I got into the habit of looking very closely at every single sentence in an article that I was writing or editing. After a while, I began to look at each sentence as having a function within the entire article. Now this approach which I first learned at Bloomberg News while I was a reporter there turned out to be a very useful way of looking at a piece of news writing because it helped me to group together various types of points that what other similar kind, which in turn made it easier for me to organize the content of any article that I was writing. Here's the basic model. I saw that news articles generally broke down into a few key functional elements that you could look at. For instance, I'd report the main news itself, which was usually mentioned at the very first sentence of a news article. Something like this, the unemployment rate rose to seven per cent according to a government report. That was the news category, if you like, which was one type of functional elements, the news itself. Another functional element was the details of the news, which basically means any type of further details that arose from the news itself. I'm talking about sentences like this. The once a month jobs report was published on Thursday, where that sentence gives us further information or further details about the main news. Because here we're learning when the report was published Thursday, which is a detail is not mentioned in the news initially, that the fact that it's once a month report, which has another detail. Another detail we could later add to the story might be something like this. According to the report, some 3 million people are jobless across the nation. So basically the details in this particular news story could be anything either about the unemployment report or about it's released today. That's the functional category that we could call details. And it's an important Cadbury because anyone who reads the newspaper essentially wants to know first what happened, the news, and then some details about it that can help fill in the picture for them. And it helps to have this category. So you can then manage that category of information well, throughout the entire article. Okay, what else does a new story needs to have other than the news itself and then details about the news. Well, how about context of the event that's being covered? Contexts is another key functional component of every good news story, isn't it? Because a reader usually wants to know not only what happened, but also to be informed of all reminded of the context in which that thing is happening, or maybe some of the background to it. So, can you think of a sentence that might fall into this context category of a new story. Well, it might be a sentence comparing, for example, the current unemployment rate with the jobless rate a year ago. A year ago, the unemployment rate was much lower at roughly four per cent. Such information would provide some helpful contexts to the new story. Wouldn't it be able to compare the current rate with the figure a year earlier and understand how much worse It's gotten. Or we could provide a more recent figure than that to compare it with. Or we could add a sentence about what the government has been doing recently to try to create new jobs. And that information would also give some helpful context to the news that the jobless rate has jumped. It's not details about the news itself, but its context to it. Something like this. Several months ago, the government launched its back to life job training program to help the long-term unemployed re-enter the workforce. Or you can have a sentence explaining that the latest rising joblessness puts pressure on the Prime Minister to resign, assuming that were true, the worsening unemployment rate has intensified. Opposition calls for the Prime Minister to resign. Are you beginning to understand now what I mean by functional categories? In this case, the news category, the details category, and the context category. Once you have those categories to work with, you can neatly switch between them to create a coherent and easy to follow news story, which will be much better than one that randomly switched between sentences of one type and the other. Because now you can group things. Now those categories, in my view, are the main ones in a news story. There are others. But for a long time, I use this basic model to shape the news stories I wrote for large news organizations. Another category was one that you might call authoritative comment. That was where in addition to telling readers the news, details and context of the story, you could include a comment or a quote from a person, or two or three that is considered to have sufficient authority to add clarity or depth to whatever news was being reported. Important thing I'm trying to get across here is that functional categories of this type can be used to neatly organize your sentences into larger units that we might call blocks of ideas, which grouped together sentences of a similar functional type. Doing this with a new story, you may end up with a narrative structure that looks like this. News. Details, context or authority? More details. More context, more authority, more details. Do you see what I mean? As I said, having these abstract categories to play with, you can give you a better shape or a better design to your new stories rather than randomly placing sentences have no particular type. One after the other, it starts to look more coherent and organized that way. Come back to this idea in later lessons and in various different ways because it's just so important. For now, I just want you to observe that once you learn to break your content down into these sorts of functional categories, you'll find that you are able to organize it a lot better. You begin to see your writing not merely as a series of sentences. The sentences that come together to form blocks of ideas. And seeing it this way, as you'll soon see, is a game changer. When it comes to writing, well, you can start by applying this same principle to your own pieces of writing which may have different types of functional categories than the one I spoke of that you can work with now to shape and design your pros to the best, your ability. So I encourage you to practice seeing the functional categories of whatever you're writing and what other people have written as well as often as possible. You'll see that by grouping your ideas in this careful where you'll begin to have much greater leverage over the shape of your writing, which will inevitably begin to look more orderly and more organized. So that completes our look at the anatomy of content. Now onto the next important feature of an exceptional writers mindset. Obsessive attention to detail. Follow me if you want to find out more. 13. Obsessive attention to detail: A regular writer may look closely at what they've written. An exceptional writer looks obsessively at what they've written. They'll pick it apart again and again. And they'll ask a deep probing questions about every single aspect of it. Was that the right word to use there? Could this sentence have been better written? Is this paragraph too long? You get what I mean right? Now, this kind of obsession can of course be a danger if it means that you're never satisfied with what you've written. Absolute perfection after all, is somewhat of an elusive goal. But if you want to write brilliantly, you must encourage yourself to develop this sort of extreme attention to detail. It's the only way to ensure that your written work will stand out in terms of its authority and its professionalism and its style. This requires a different mindset from what you may have been taught at school or college where getting your meaning across was usually all that mattered. Style generally took a back seat. Exceptional writer. It looks at everything with a view to making it as excellent as possible. In whatever time is available, you see a college tutor maybe willing to overlook a somewhat wordy sentence or a misplaced comma, or an elastic, inelegantly worded phrase, or a little bit of a boring passage that one of their students has written. And they will usually turn a blind eye, for instance, in an essay, you happen to repeat the same idea because you forgot you said it before. Or if you use a word that is ridiculously fancy to express what is really a very simple idea. What your professor will likely most care about is whether you made a good point or made a convincing case. They will often overlook what they see as trivial mistakes or a poor writing style. In a similar way, your boss at work will easily forgive you if an email you send to them is arranged a little untidy Lee with say, a missing full stop or a weirdly placed semicolon. Or if some of the sentences are a bit too long, or that they sound a bit awkward. Or if a written report that you present has several superfluous words in it all starts off with a morbidly obese paragraph. An editor for a top newspaper, on the other hand, never overlook such monstrosities. In fact, they see it as their sacred duty to find and eliminate them. Now, when I say pay attention, obsessive attention to detail in your writing, you may have guessed that I'm not just talking about spotting typos in a text, which of course can make it look unprofessional. A top news editorial book editor will troll through a reporters or author's work until every single trace of literary ugliness has been found and dealt with everything from cleaning up tautological expressions such as the sum total or an unexpected surprise, where both words in the phrase mean roughly the same thing to a string of sentences that are too structurally similar and therefore sound monotonous together. Once you've been trained to spot such copywriting atrocities, you'll begin to enjoy having this eagle eye for detail. You'll probably then charcoal as I often do, when, for example, a sign at your local park States somewhat ambiguously, if your dog does a ***, please put it in the bin. Like me, you'll spend ages wondering whether it's better to say in a particular sentence, for example, or for instance, based on which one you use last time in the same piece of writing. And like me, you'll sometimes torture yourself over whether the more suitable expression to use in a sentence is in fact or indeed. Like me, you'll also cringe whenever a friend shows you how resume that describes her mysteriously as dynamic individual with an innovative approach to managing workflow environments. See if you want to become an exceptional writer, U2 have to cultivate an attention to detail and a commitment to good style that goes way beyond what normal people are able to master. This means looking closely, ultimately at every single word on the page and asking whether a, it is relevant, be, is it useful C, is it worthwhile to use an example from the teaching of journalism that I often use in my programs. If you were to come across a sign at a fish monger that said fresh fish sold here. An exceptional writer would begin by asking themselves whether each of those words were strictly necessary. Now if you ask this, you may conclude first step here isn't needed because you're already there. The fresh may not be needed because nobody would advertise selling stale fish. That sold might be unnecessary because nobody expects fish to be given away for free. And finally, the fish may also not be needed as well. Standing there, you're more than likely be able to smell the fish anyway. That's the level of attention to detail that I'm talking about. So from today onwards, I want you to commit to asking these sorts of deep questions about everything you write. Whether an idea contained in a long sentence might work better if broken down into two or maybe three separate sentences. Whether the rhythm of the writing could be enhanced with the use of a semicolon rather than say, a comma. Yes, the principle of paying extreme attention to detail applies equally to punctuation, not only towards, for example, in elite writer will repeatedly ask themselves whether this or that comma isn't just grammatically correct, but also whether it truly serves a useful purpose and whether it contributes to or upsets the gracefulness of a sentence, or whether the drama in a sentence might be improved if a dash or used in place of a colon, or if you change the word here and there are altered the rhythm slightly. For instance, you might weigh up changing this sentence. The son looked remarkable today as it rose like a deity from behind the silvery clouds to something like this. The son looked breathtaking today, ascending from behind the silvery clouds like an orange deity. Not that one way is better necessarily than the other. It's just that you want to have considered it. And that's the spirit with which I want you to approach your writing from now and get into the habit of questioning every aspect of what you write repeatedly. And over time, you'll see that it begins to steadily and increasingly acquire the hallmarks of quality. Think of it as turning over every stone in your copy and polishing it till they all shine. Okay, next up, I'm going to teach you two of the major qualities that are found in most exceptional writing. And believe me, you really will want to incorporate these two qualities into your elite writers mindset as soon as possible. 14. How to become more articulate and eloquent: In the last lesson I taught you why it's important to pay obsessive attention to detail whenever writing something, to turn over every stone so to speak, to ensure you're writing always looks polished and professional. After doing this, you will know that you've made the best available choices with regard to your words, sentences, paragraphs, and even punctuation. In this lesson, I want to talk to you about two more special qualities that you should strive to in part two, you're writing as often as possible, then the qualities of being one articulate and two eloquent. Now these two words have very similar meanings to each other. Articulate means having the ability to speak coherently and fluently. And eloquent means fluent or persuasive in either speaking or writing. So there is some crossover. Suffice it to say that good writers generally are both articulate and eloquent. But what's required to be able to convey those two qualities through your writing? Well, first off, it's important that you know lots of different words. And secondly, that you're familiar with lots of different ways of saying things. Which basically means you have to have read a lot because that's the best way to imbibe lots of different words and different writing styles. Now, with a very wide vocabulary, you'll find it easier to convey your thoughts precisely and also colorfully. The good news is that you can work consciously to build up your vocabulary so that you can become more articulate and eloquent with each year that passes. You see words and sentences are really quite amazing. They're just there just so many ways to express an idea in terms of the words, the language, or the punctuation that you use. For instance, the particular words and punctuation you choose can determine whether a particular idea in your copy is expressed in a sober way or in a passionate way, or in a cautious way, in a dramatic way, in an understated way, in a cynical way, in a witty way, or in a poetic way. Needless to say, however, in order to have access to all these countless ways of expressing your thoughts and ideas, you'll need to know a lot of words, and you'll need to know families of words. What I mean is you need to know the different shades of meaning that distinguish similar words from each other as well as from their opposite words. Now, as you'll learn in an upcoming lesson is often great to use simple words in a sentence such as this one coming up because they make a sentence punchier. After months of practice, Sean felt ready to show off to the audience is wide range of magic tricks. But you'll have much more power over how your writing comes across. If you have access to more words and ways of expressing yourself. As here. After months of grueling practice, Sean felt ready to enthralled the audience with his ghoulish array of magic tricks. Now again, I'm not saying one way is necessarily better than the other, but it helps to be empowered to make those choices for yourself as a writer by simply knowing more words. Now the two most powerful tools that exist for the purpose of becoming articulate and eloquent. Are, you guessed it? A dictionary and thesaurus, both of which these can easily be found online. Here now is what I would suggest as a way of improving these two mindset qualities of being articulate and eloquent very quickly. First, whenever reading get into the habit of religiously at first, looking up any words that you don't understand, simply look up its definition in the dictionary. Then once you've understood its meaning, try at least once to apply it in a sentence of your own making. That will help make the word stick by actually using it rather than just knowing its meaning. Next slide suggest to you then look up that word, the same word in a thesaurus and you'll be presented with a family of similar words are called synonyms. Along with the words that have the opposite meaning or antonyms. Look up the definition of a few of those words to preferably ones you don't know too well, but as somewhat familiar with, to help you understand the shades of meaning that are available to you. You'll soon discover that around each word there are satellite words that enable you to make finer and finer distinctions between the things in life. Now, knowing plenty of synonyms, even for the words you use often has two great uses for when you write. First, it means that you can express yourself more precisely or indeed colorfully whenever the need arises. Secondly, it means you can substitute words with a similar meaning when you've been a bit too repetitive with the same word in the piece of writing. Okay, so let's start practicing these skills so we can all become progressively more articulate and eloquent. Say you came across the following sentence in a book that you were reading. She had an illimitable capacity for kindness. And let's assume you've never come across that big word, illimitable before. First, you look it up and you come across this sort of a definition, illimitable, being or seeming to be without limits. And you learn that it's an adjective, which is a word as you know, that describes things, right? So you think you kind of get it. And so now you try using illimitable in a sentence of your own. How about you pause this video and give it a go yourself? Perhaps you got something like this. I often feel overwhelmed when I reflect on the illimitable expanse of the universe. Next, you look up the same word in a thesaurus, and you find these similar words, bottomless, boundless, fathomless, in measurable, infinite, unbounded, and so on. Now you take those words, especially those you don't understand all that well, but that you've maybe heard of. And you go look up the definitions. Make note of the subtle differences now between these words and the word you started with, illimitable. Okay, So let's take one of those alternative words in measurable. One definition I found of immeasurable was immeasurable, incapable of being measured. Usually because it's too vast to be measured. So do you note the subtle difference there from illimitable being Without Limits versus not capable of being measured. They're similar but different, right? You could possibly use those two words synonymously in some contexts, couldn't you? For instance, I often feel overwhelmed when I reflect on the measurable expanse of the universe where we're using a measurable there instead of illimitable. Just like almost always, they also have their own specific meaning as well, which makes them not always interchangeable. Like the vast mountain range was immeasurable versus the vast mountain range was illimitable. Which doesn't quite work, does it? Because a mountain range tends to have limits, even though it might not be capable of being measured easily. Now of course, you might use the word illimitable there for poetic effects and it could work. The point is that now having studied the difference between the two words more closely, you've empowered yourself to use them both either simultaneously when you want to avoid repetition, for instance, or exclusively when you, to be precise, or when you may prefer one word over the other for some other reason. Knowing this difference between two similar words, you have just a sharpened your ability to express yourself more accurately, appropriately and effectively. I hope you can see that the expert writers able to wield such words with definitely precision whenever the moment demands. And their writing as a result of having this incredible power is usually more engaging and more captivating. Now pause this and try out the same process with a similar sounding word, immutable and come back when you're done. Okay, I hope that went well for you. That's how I want you to explore the colorful universe of words that lies before you. Over time. I promise you that the payoff will be enormous. You'll find that as your vocabulary grows, you'll always have a wide range of words on hand for expressing an idea in exactly the way you want. In other words, you'll progressively become more and more articulate and more and more eloquent. Hope that now you are very well aware of the various ways in which you can approach your writing from a mindset point of view to dramatically raise its quality. Let me briefly recap to help lock in your learning. In this section, you'll learn that you should first off, have something truly worth saying. Otherwise, what's the point in writing something? Right? Second, you'll learn the importance of clearly defining your purpose, which we broke down into your primary and maybe secondary intentions on the one hand and on the other hand, your specific audience. Thirdly, we learned the five aspirations of an elite copyright to remember those the aspiration to write comprehensively, beautifully, effectively, engage singly, and authentically. Then we learn that writing can usefully be broken down into two fundamental components, its content and its tone. And that by seeing it this way, can help you focus on each component separately to make sure you're writing hits the mark in terms of your audience and performs as intended. Then we looked at how your content could be broken down itself into various functional categories. And you learned that you could use this knowledge of the atomic structure of your narrative to organize ideas in a better way. Finally, we learned the importance of becoming more articulate and eloquent simply by using a dictionary and thesaurus as you read along to something. Now keeping these different mindset principles in mind, we're ready to explore the two powerful writing perspectives that I told you about. And I'll see you on the other side where I shall reveal all. 15. Two powerful writing frameworks: By now, I'll assume that you have thoroughly studied and learn the mindset of exceptional writers, which was covered in detail in this section of the course. What follows in the next section is the first of the two powerful writing perspective that I promised to teach you. That the two perspectives that helped me to write and edit articles for top news organizations, including the Wall Street Journal newspaper. Their perspectives that have enabled me to write highly effective copy, that has helped me to successfully as well sell my online writing courses too close to a million students, as well as to edit documents for many global companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and PWC. So trust me when I say that these two writing perspectives will help you to get near to the top of the learning curve when it comes to writing with style and flare. The first perspective is what I call the secret source perspective. And it's the subject of the next section of this course. Here I'll explain to you what I call the secret sauce of good writing, which basically amounts to four vital ingredients that go into producing exceptional copy every time. The second perspective is what I call my deep editing framework. And this is where I'll discuss what I call the four dimensions of exquisite prose, which is really useful for editing any type of nonfiction content. In a nutshell, that's how this course will go from here, empowering you with these two perspectives. Know that you'll be getting in a very short time what it took me more than 20 years to learn on my own after writing and editing for top news companies. Now, before we get into the first of the writing perspectives, the secret sauce, here are a few assignments that will help you to better absorb the teachings that I shared with you in this mindset section. Look at something you've written and ask whether you truly had something worth saying a good reason for writing it. Asked to what extent this something you've written was a easily comprehensible. Be beautiful to read, see engaging to read. D authentic, and E, effective in terms of fulfilling your purpose. With the next thing you write, begin it by explicitly defining your primary intention, for example, to inform, persuade, and your particular audience so that you're completely clear on your overall purpose. Tweak both the content and tone of something you've written to make it more effective. Ask yourself, what are the high level categories, AG, news details, contexts that repeatedly come up in the type of writing that you do. 16. How I discovered the secret sauce: While I was an editor at The Wall Street Journal, not too many years ago, my bosses in Hong Kong asked me if I wanted to help the papers, reporters and editors across Asia to improve their news writing skills. Now I jumped at the chance to indulge two of my favorite passions, teaching and traveling. In this new exciting role, I get the chance to share my writing tips and strategies with dozens of my colleagues across the entire Asia-Pacific region. What a wonderful opportunity that was. It was a mission that would take me to Tokyo, to Bangkok soul and elsewhere. Where I'd sit with reporters, discuss their writing challenges and let them look over my shoulder as they edited their articles. I'd also hold workshops where I would explain my writing techniques to them. As I became more and more familiar with myMethod of writing, I realized something quite fascinating. I realized that although I often make many changes to a reported article, I was really only making four types of changes. I would make the writing more simple than before, where perhaps it had been long-winded or unnecessarily complicated. Secondly, I'd make the writing more clear. Say if it was imprecise or murky for some reason or other. Third, I'd make the writing more elegant. If to me, it felt somehow clunky or disorganized or that it didn't flow well and forth. I'd make the writing more evocative where basically I felt that it had been too dry or a bit boring. And that truly seemed to be all that I ever did. I'm serious, those were the only four things I found myself doing to an article to make it read better. I just made the writing more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative, and nothing more. That's why I came to call this eventually the secret sauce of good writing, because these were the only four ingredients that I needed to make any piece of nonfiction writing sparkle. Again, simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. And this right here is the first powerful writing perspective that I'm going to teach you. Now as it happens, this is probably the most useful of all the perspectives for improving your writing quickly and dramatically. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a very good idea of what this secret sauces and also what it can do for your writing. Again, to reassure you the secret sauce will work on articles, blog posts, e-commerce scripts, sales e-mails, marketing copy, and any type of business correspondence. So don't make the mistake of thinking that the four ingredients are going to only be useful for news writing. Simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness are in fact the fundamental design principles that I use for writing or editing any type of nonfiction writing. And that's the best way to think of them, in fact, as design principles. So here again are the four ingredients in my secret source. Simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. I want you to know that in reality, it's hard to separate out the role of each ingredient. But the following breakdown may help you to understand a little better why each ingredient is so important for enhancing the quality of your writing. By simplifying your writing to the highest degree, you'll make it more engaging to readers as it will become lighter, faster, and punchier. The second ingredient, clarity, basically make your writing easier to understand and follow along to its ingredient that leads to better comprehension of your content. Elegance is the ingredient that makes your writing basically flow better. It gives you a writing more order, rhythm, balance, poise, and gracefulness. And finally, evocativeness is ingredient that makes your writing more stimulating and throttling and captivating. And here's an easy way to remember the impact of each ingredient in the secret source. Simplicity makes your writing ping. Clarity makes it ring. Elegance, makes it sing, and evocativeness makes it zing. Now I want to just quickly proved the power of this little formula to you by showing you how significantly you can improve even a single sentence. Just take a look at this passage on the screen, some version of which I often get my students to edit before delving into the tactics. It was indicated to the President by his chief adviser that it should be attempted to formulate a decision to act at the earliest opportunity in the best interests of circumventing what might otherwise result in the country flowering into embarking on a prolonged, extended, an exorbitant military conflagration. Now pause the video and take a moment to edit that sentence using just the four ingredients that I mentioned in whatever way you understand them at this time. At this stage, I want you to focus on nothing more than making the writing more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative. Okay, Well here's what I got after applying the four ingredients to this rather unwieldy and murky sentence, the President's Chief Adviser urged him to act quickly to avert a long costly war. I hope you've got something similar and hopefully even better than that. Either way, I want you to just note that this new sentence is a great deal more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative than the original. Here's another one to quickly try. It was the view of the vast majority of the directors on the advisory board of the company electron ink, after a vote with only one exception, that it would be of the opinion that punitive measures be directed at the chief executive, Mike Fleming, for the numerous things that he has done badly for the company. Is that simple, clear, elegant, and evocative know, right? So pause this and try to make that horrible sentence which is flawed in so many ways as simple, clear, elegant, and evocative as you can. Now, there are so many different ways to improve that sentence to be sure. But here's one way to make it more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative. In my view, lectins Advisory Board voted almost unanimously to punish CEO Mike Fleming for his repeated failures. That's much better than the original one. Write. The sentence is punchier and more engaging as a result of being simplified in various ways. It's more, Chris, thanks to being much clearer than the original, it flows better as a result of being more elegantly written. And it's also more stimulating or evocative thanks to the use of some dramatic language like punish and repeated failures and things, and even the use of dashes in that way. Now again, if this is the impact that the secret source can have on a single sentence, imagine what it could do for an entire piece of writing. Well, in the coming lectures, in this section, I'll be showing you several ways in which you can make your writing more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative. And you'll therefore quickly come to see what a difference that applying this formula can make to the readability and the overall quality of your writing. However, I need you to be aware that while it's helpful in general to try to optimize the simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness of your writing. You should always consider how much of each ingredient is suitable or necessary for the particular thing that you're writing. Indeed, sometimes you'll have to seek a balance between one ingredient and another or one tactic and another. Similarly, a legal document that you are drafting may not need to be especially evocative. So you may not focus too heavily on making it. So in fact, you may need to deliberate and make it not. So otherwise, it might read more like a blog post and no one might say take it seriously. Indeed, in a legal document, that emphasis on clarity would be likely vastly more than on any of the other three ingredients. In fact, it would usually need to be exceptionally clear, even if that meant repeating words a lot or stating things in a bit of a clunky or inelegant way. What I'm really pointing to here is that there may be times when these four ingredients clash with each other, where you're basically forced to compromise in order to better fulfill your objective that the end result of any piece of writing is in fact, always gonna be some kind of artistic balancing of the four ingredients appropriately. And that's why rather than throwing all the four ingredients into the pot and hoping the dish tastes nice. I'm going to encourage you to view yourself more like a master chef, carefully blending and balancing the ingredients in a way that achieves the best flavors for the particular dish that you're preparing. Now, this may all sound a bit abstract to you right now, especially if you're totally new to my writing training. But please don't worry by the end of the next few sections where I'll be explaining each of the four ingredients one-by-one. What I'm saying now should all make perfect sense to you. Okay, so let's get to it. In the next lesson, we'll begin by exploring the powerful ingredient of simplicity, the first ingredient in the secret source. And we'll be asking ourselves one question. How do you make your writing more simple so that it becomes more light, will fast, and more punchy. 17. The magic of simplicity: In the previous section, I taught you the mindset and basic tools of a superior copywriter. In this section, we're going to begin now digging into the first of the two powerful writing perspectives that I mentioned. And as I said, it's what I call the secret sauce perspective, or the four ingredients of exceptional writing. The previous lesson, I told you that exceptional writing has four basic ingredients. Simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness, which makes your writing respectively ping, ring, sing and zinc. In this lesson, we're going to begin by exploring the first of those splendid ingredients, simplicity, which as you'll see, is the ingredient that makes your writing light, fast and punchy. I'm going to tell you a bit more about the power of the simplicity here. Then in the lessons that follow immediately afterwards, I'll show you some specific ways that you can enhance the simplicity of your writing to help give it more style and more impact. Now why does simplicity matter in writing? Well, as you probably know, they've always been right around who think or assume that it's somehow shows intelligence or sophistication to use big words or complicated sentences in order to express your ideas. That is, they tend to deliberately write in a long-winded and somewhat flowery or perhaps formal way, kind of like this. For example, in the light of the extent, scale range, and immeasurable complexity of the uncertainties that persist on the economic front. We conclude having evaluated the country's mid to long term prospects, that multifarious scenarios could yet unfold. Now pause this video and have a go at stating that particular idea more simply and plainly. Done that I bet it was hard because it was to some degree, Much Ado About Nothing but it's possible to eke out an idea from it. And here's how one of my clever students did it. In this economy. Anything can happen. I think that cuts to the very heart of it without leaving anything important out. And also, just look at how snappy and engaging that sentence now is. Now in the following lessons, I'll be showing you that using formal, official, fancy or convoluted language for its own sake. Or having sentences replete with unnecessary words or needlessly complicated sentence structures. Like in the previous example, it doesn't in fact, make you come across as either more intelligent or sophisticated, except perhaps to highly gullible people. More often than not, it makes your writing seem tedious, really, quite pretentious. And in fact tiresome to get through. And that's why I, and many other writing teachers usually suggests that it's best to keep your writing as simple, plain, and thrifty as possible. You'll find that when you do this, your prose naturally becomes more, as I said, light, fast, and punchy and hence more engaging. In the following lessons, we're going to explore the concept of simplicity in many of its aspects. And you're going to agree with me by the end. I hope that simple really is beautiful. We'll begin in the next lesson by looking at the benefit of using as few words as possible to express your ideas, which is a key component of simplicity and one that journalists often referred to as creating tight writing. Tight writing results from making your writing more efficient by removing all unnecessary words from your text so that it pings. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how that particular thing is done. 18. How to make your writing tight: In the last lesson, I introduced you to the concept of simplicity and explain why it's important to apply it to your writing. In this lesson, you're going to learn why it's important that you remove all unnecessary words from your writing whenever possible or feasible so that you can make it as crisp, concise, and efficient as possible. Now by the end of this lesson, you will have learned several different ways to make your writing more tight as they say, and thereby more snappy or punchy. Now, one reason why you're writing can often feel slow and heavy is because it contains too many unnecessary words in it, what you might call wordy or long-winded writing. Conversely, good writing often feels tight or springy and therefore more engaging and readable precisely because all of that hot air has been taken out from your sentences. Let's have a closer look at this idea which some of us cool economy in writing. You imagine you're writing an email to your coworker asking her to do something for you. And this email came out looking a bit like this. Becky, please have a talk with Sheila at some point and ask her what she happens to think about Mark's idea about how to redesign the current logo. And then please try to get back to me and let me know what she says about this. Now that's quite a long winded way of saying something that's really a lot simpler, isn't it? In such sentences you'll notice that there's a lot of room for cutting words. So just pause the video now and have a go at whittling the email down to its bare essentials without of course, losing any of the content or the tone that you consider to be important. Okay, done that. Let me, I managed to get this punchier version of the same sentence. Please let me know Becky, what Sheila thinks of Mark's new logo design. There we've got it down to a fraction of the number of words without necessarily even sacrificing the essentially polite tone. Here's another example I like to use because it makes the point, well, the sentence here at first sight seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it? The specific point I am seeking to make here is that the colors red and gray go well together. Have a go yourself first at cutting back on the number of words in that sentence. Okay, Then let's see how I might approach it. First off, do we really need the word here? Not really. It's redundant. You could just toss it out and say more simply, the specific point I am seeking to make is that the colors red and gray go well together. Now, points are by nature specific, aren't they? So we could also get rid of the word specific without really losing anything. And that would leave us with the point I am seeking to make is that the colors red and gray go well together. But why do you need to say the point I am seeking to make? You could shorten that to say even more simply. My point is that the colors red and gray go well together. But you need to even say my point. After all, anyone would presumably know that it's a point being made. You don't need to signal it. So you could simply say, the colors red and gray go well together. This is how you've got to train yourself to think about words. You're getting the basic idea, I hope right? Making the sentences more and more efficient bit by bit. Now, to continue, does it need to be said that red and gray are colors? Well, probably not, right? So we could, if we wanted to say even more economically than that, red and gray go well together. Now let's just take a moment to notice how much real estate we've saved by consciously removing all of those unnecessary words from that word he sentence. Not only that, we've actually managed to give the sentence more power in charge by getting rid of all those wasteful words, haven't we? Now remember that how far are you going cutting words in a sentence will depend on a number of other factors as well, including your audience and their preferences, or what you perceive their preferences to be, your own intention and how well the words you use relate to those things and to the particular type of writing that you're doing, which may have certain conventions, will come with certain expectations that you have to factor in. All I'm really saying here is that the leaner, meaner sentences in general are going to give you a writing and altogether lighter and faster pace, making the writing generally more engaging. And don't worry, you can always add words back in later if you need to in order to achieve either more clarity, elegance, and evocativeness after you've simplified it. Now thankfully, there is a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to making your writing more efficient and thus punchier that I want to make you aware of. For instance, keep an eye out for carelessly twin words like the companies discussed the potential for a joint collaboration. Collaboration is always undertaken jointly, isn't it? So why do we do need to use both words together in a sentence? We'd like to learn more about your future plans. Will plans always made for the future, right? So you could more simply an economically say, we'd like to learn more about your plans. He received an unexpected surprise when he entered the room. Well, as surprised as we saw by its nature, is unexpected, isn't it? So, is the word unexpected really necessary? Here? It's something that you want to think about. That's one way to get tighter writing by calling any words that you don't need. You can also make your writing tighter in another way though. And that's by not carelessly repeating ideas that you've previously expressed. As here, almost half of the population are close to 50 per cent is vulnerable to contracting the disease. Now almost half and close to 50 per cent essentially mean the same thing. Don't they? Hear crime in this city is getting worse and it's not getting any better. Well, if it's getting worse than by necessity is not getting any better. So that's what you call a mindless repetition. And sometimes it's more subtle than that. So I encourage you to actively look for these sorts of hidden redundancies in your prose and to do away with any wasteful words or ideas that you find. Now focusing on efficiency is just one way of getting your writing to be more punchy and engaging. In the next lesson, I'll teach you how to magnify the impact of simplicity even more. And it's by aiming to be more direct and straightforward with the language you use. Rather than making your writing pointlessly official or fancy, find out more on the other side. 19. How to make your writing plain: So as we saw in the last lesson, focusing on getting rid of hot air from your sentences or unnecessary or redundant words is one way that we can easily simplify our writing. In this lesson, I'm going to teach you another way to simplify our writing, which is by making it less fluffy, formal, and flowery. It's by making basically your language itself more simple. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand how much lighter your writing becomes when you're able to convey your meaning as plainly as possible, rather than using dense, heavy, or turgid language of the type that I'm sure you've read it many times in your life, especially in college textbooks or official government documents. You see a lot of writers, sadly, are in the habit of defaulting to fancy official, bureaucratic, or technical language when it's not really necessary or even helpful. This habit often makes their writing feel more like a burden than a pleasure to read. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. So I advise you to avoid walking down your writing with needlessly heavy words. Bureaucratic words like commence, exhibit, or utilize, that you may think may make you sound more important or official. But usually they're simple, simply equivalents like starch show use are generally more engaging and do just as well a job. Now to be sure, there are times when certain heavier words like comments or utilize can be more accurate or even useful in some specific way. So I'm not saying never use them, but just keep in mind that in regular business or blog writing, overly official in needlessly fancy language will typically weaken your communication and give readers unnecessary strain. You should at least try simplifying your language so you can test out whether it feels better to read or not. Not to mention that it can often sound really pretentious when you default to unnecessarily formal or fancy words. It's as if you might be compensating for a lack of confidence by trying to cover it up with needlessly big or heavy words or unduly complicated sentence structures. Imagine a cover letter for a job that ends with this sort of over-the-top sentence. Should you determine my extensive and considerable experience to be appreciably worthwhile to your corporation and its long-term trajectory at this moment in time, I shall be pleased to invoke, facilitate and formalized and acquaintance with you at the soonest opportunity in the context of an interview. And have a go at restating that idea to read more plainly. Okay, Well, here's what I might say. I look forward to an interview if you think my experience is suitable. That's real. It's authentic and yet professional enough, right? Dial down the heaviness as often as possible and you'll find that your writing becomes infinitely more readable as a result. Now, consider this needlessly, flowery texts in an online ad for a website building this service, I will assist you in making your website actualize more recognition and visibility in a manner that is capable of significantly enhancing your traffic flow and monetization efforts through conversions. I'm pretty sure you've seen stuff like that around the right or something like that. Might feel that they've done a great job of making the writing sound really cool. But have they really, does the meaning of the sentence shine through to you? Or do you struggle a bit to make it make sense? If so, then how might you simplify that into plain English? Well, for me, something like this would work a whole lot better. I'll help drive more traffic to your website and turn more visitors into buyers. And that's much more engaging, Don't you think? Okay, consider now this excessively formal staff memo from a made-up HR department. The upcoming weekly confabulation of our staff is scheduled to commence precisely at 800 hours, whereupon beverages will be distributed to all of the gathered attendees at regular intervals. Now that kind of bureaucratese, as they call it, isn't very appealing, are engaging. How might you restate the idea to read more simply and plainly? Well, how about like this? This week staff meeting will begin sharp at 08:00 AM. Drinks will be served hourly. And that's much more engaging, isn't it? A breath of fresh air really? What I'm really saying is try to avoid defaulting to formal, fancy, bureaucratic, or technical language. In the naive belief that you're somehow coming across as more smarter or more and more appropriate. More often than not, you'll just be giving your readers needless headaches. So hopefully, now you know the value of using plain language whenever possible and appropriate. Next up we're going to look at another major roadblock to Symplicity, which is complicating things unnecessarily. 20. How to make your writing straightforward: I often discover while writing something that many of my sentences are more complicated than they need to be. This is quite normal because ideas, when we first write them down don't tend to come out perfectly. They usually need to be sculpted into shape so that they become more engaging. Our work as elite writers is to notice such unnecessarily complicated sentences and then tried to simplify them as much as possible. It's the same way a math student might be asked to take a complicated equation and simplify it for ease of calculation, first, simplifying for example, two x plus x equals 30, say three, X equals 30, and then to say x equals ten, which is of course the simplest form. Now remember as aspiring is exceptional writer at our aim should be to make our pros a pleasure to read, never a burden. And therefore taking the time to uncomplicated sentences is usually well worth the effort. In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to create a more engaging experience for your readers by uncomplicated ideas to the highest extent possible. Now, there are several ways that as writers we tend to complicate ideas. One way is something that is known as the double negative. And here's an example of that. It was not in his nature, not to be generous. Can you spot the needless complexity in that sentence? Yes, the two negatives not know. It takes a bit of time to sort it through in your head, doesn't it? Because of those negatives, they're trying to turn it into a more positive statement and see if that makes the idea of faster to comprehend. Okay, Well, how about this? He was a generous person or he was not by nature stingy. And I'm not saying never use a double negative. In fact, you may have just noticed that I use one there, but it's always worth the trouble of seeing whether you can turn double negatives around into positive expressions without losing any of the original meaning or losing any particular nuance that you'd like to capture in the sentence. Now, the second thing you want to avoid is something I call multiplying entities beyond necessity. It's another way of complicating things. Try to notice whenever you use unnecessarily descriptive words in a sentence that can turn a simple idea into something a lot more complicated than it needs to be. And here's an example of this type of over complicating. It was trichomes first overseas international purchase since the company took over and partnered with logistics firm sure-fire logistics in the year 2019. Now see how the idea has gotten more complicated than it needs to be because of all those repetitive descriptors. Have a go yourself expressing that idea more simply by removing any potentially unnecessary descriptors. Well, how about this for a leaner tied to sentence, it was tried goes first overseas purchases. The company bought sure-fire logistics in 2019. And that simplifies the sentence by taking out some ideas and concepts that may be implied already. Okay, next I want to show you another way that writers tend to over complicate things by giving readers unnecessary distractions, which take attention away from whatever points are being made. Some writers, for instance, capitalize certain words mid-sentence when there's really no good reason to do so. As here, an experienced web designer with a deep knowledge of Cloud software and services, that's quite ugly, isn't it? On the page, not only because the capital letters mostly aren't necessary, but also because they're used inconsistently in the very same sentence. It's kind of confusing, right? Because subconsciously your mind begins trying to make sense of all those capital letters in there in order to assign some kind of meaning to them when there really isn't any. How would you rewrite it? Well, I might just write this. I'm an experienced web designer with a deep knowledge of Cloud software and services. And that's so much easier on the eye, isn't it? And so much more comprehensible to as writers concerned with communicating well, we always want to think of our readers first and how we can make the reading experience as painless as possible for them. Focusing on simplicity allows us to do this. Of course, when you're actually naming an institution, you'd usually need to capitalize the individual words in the title. Or that itself could be distracting. As here, the Reserve Bank of Australia, that's an institution. You have to capitalize those words, or the White House, right? You're naming it rather than just describing it. But usually, at least from a style perspective, you don't really need to capitalize words if you're simply making a reference to an institution rather than naming it. For example, as here, the country's central bank raised interest rates this week. Now, don't you find those capital letters horribly distracting? So how might you edit it to read more simply? Me, hydride. The country's central bank raised interest rates this week. And that's a lot more user-friendly, right? In general, the fewer distractions there are, including any pointless commas or pointless quote marks or pointless other types of punctuation, then the more frictionless your words will fly into a reader's consciousness so that they almost forget that they're reading something. One other thing, take care not to use italicize bold or quote marks around words unless you're doing it. Because it's truly necessary or useful, either for clarity or for some other sort of artistic reason that you might have. Okay, so now you've seen various ways in which writing can be simplified to make it lighter, punchier and more engaging. In the next lesson, I'm going to introduce to you the second ingredient in the secret source, clarity, equality that will give you a writing. Another dimension of power and beauty. But first, I'd like to set a challenge for you by to help embed some of the simplicity teachings given in this lesson. Remove the unnecessary words, heavy language, and complications in this sentence to make it more punchy and engaging. To be sure the company in question time warp as aforementioned in previous statements of hours on previous dates, is the one tasked with the responsibility to ensure the commencement of the various acts in regards to the upcoming concert at the appropriate time. Now go away and find as well an old piece of writing you've done or something that's on the internet and work through it, looking for sentences. You can make more tight, more plain, and more straightforward. 21. The magic of clarity: In the previous lesson, we saw how applying the ingredient of simplicity to your writing can make it lighter, punchier and more engaging. Here, I'm now going to introduce you to the second ingredient in the secret source. Do you remember? Well, that was that's right. Clarity. And believe me, once you understand this powerful ingredient in all its depth, it will make your writing not only easily comprehensible to your readers, but also razor-sharp, which will make it even more enjoyable for people to consume your content. Now, clarity is all about pinning down your ideas and articulating them so firmly and so precisely that there can be no doubt whatsoever about your intended meaning. Your readers, in other words, will instantly get what you're saying. But clarity also means placing your words down on the page with the utmost care. Every word is considered has, is its position in a sentence which has chosen to express your meaning best. Now, apart from how you place words in a sentence, improving the clarity of your writing can also mean avoiding language that is too abstract and or hollow to easily understand. That is any torque that might go over the heads of your readers or cause them even for a single moment to draw a blank. This scale of effort in the realm of clarity is absolutely essential if you're serious about becoming an exceptional writer. And this is not least because without clarity, the other three ingredients become virtually useless. You see, you can usually get away with writing that is perhaps lacking in simplicity, elegance, or evocativeness, as long as it's clear enough to comprehend. As long as readers basically understand what you're saying, long as they can generally follow along. But what would be the point in trying to make your writing more simple, elegant, or evocative if it was going to remain unclear in the end anyway. And that's why I often say that clarity is the most fundamental ingredient in the secret sauce. Now in the lessons that follow, we're going to look at three ways to make our writing more clear. One by making it more precise too, by making it more sharp. And three, by making it more specific. Let's begin our journey into the realm of clarity by exploring how you can make your writing more precise. 22. How to make your writing precise: In this lesson, you're going to learn how to improve your writing by nailing down your meaning really precisely. By the end of it, you should know how to avoid leaving your readers confused by sentences that may be too murky or too fuzzy to immediately clear. Let's start by looking at an example of a really unclear sentence from a blog post that I made up, world renewed author Jack lists said today nine days is a new book that was mostly written in the basement during a book signing. Although with the rest of the chapters that would have been written in a nearby park. Now this has got just so much wrong with it in terms of clarity, right? Go ahead and pause the video and see if you can spot first of all, how many things in terms of clarity or wrong with it? Write those things down if it helps. Done that well, first off, there's an actual mistaken word in there. It should be world renowned, not world renewed. And that's really bad stock. Secondly, there's a lack of clarity as to whether it is in fact Jake talking about his own book or perhaps Jake talking about someone else's book. Did you notice that ambiguity there? Let's assume it is own book that he's talking about for our purposes. Thirdly, there is some doubt as to what the actual book title is. Notice the writer hasn't used any clear indicators such as bold or italics or even appropriate capital letters. So it's kind of hard to know where the book title begins and ends. We can guess and we might get it right, but we wouldn't know for sure. The book's title could be today nine days or it might simply be nine days where the word today refers to when Jake Bliss actually said this. In other words, the careless use of capital letters prevents us from knowing for sure what's meant here. Now, look at where during a book signing is placed within the sentence. It makes the Senate really quite fuzzy, doesn't it? Because it's hard to pin the phrase down properly to the rest of the sentence. Not to mention that all the tensors are mixed messed up, making comprehension even more difficult. Various opposing or inconsistent tensors are used, such as was would have been an ease, making the sentence really hard to navigate. Finally, the phrase would have been written in a nearby park, makes it difficult to determine whether those particular chapters were actually written in a nearby park or whether they might have been written in a nearby park. But actually we're not. You may have noticed even more problems, but let's agree that this is one big stinking mess. Now, I'd like to ask you to rewrite the sentence after thinking a little bit about what the writer may have been trying to say here. I appreciate that some guesswork may be required here as, as usually happens when things are ambiguous. As this. This happens a lot when you're an editor, you're forced sometimes to make a guess as to what the author means because it's not evidently clear. So go for it. Okay, How did that go? Well, how about if we rewrite the sentence like this? Had a book signing event today, world-renowned author jake Bliss said he wrote most of the chapters of his new book, nine days while in its basement. The rest, he said, were written in a nearby park. Now there are other possibly better ways of doing it, I'm sure, but I just wanted to show you how to make a really foggy sentence a whole lot clearer for your readers merely by focusing on being precise. Now, if we wanted to, we could certainly go on to make the passage more elegant and evocative as well. But for now at least, we have clarity in place as a firm foundation for anything else we might want to add to it. Now here's another type of foggy sentence that I often see in the world of journalism. Microsoft press release said it plans to open several new high street stores. What's wrong with that? Well, it sounds as if the press release rather than the company itself is planning to open the stores, doesn't it? So how would you fix this to nail down the intended meaning? More precisely? Well, here's one way. Microsoft said in a press release that it plans to open several new high street stores. Or alternatively, in a press release, microsoft said it plans to open several new high street stores. And that approach gives us more clarity and precision, doesn't it? So just make sure you're never being lazy with your writing or editing. Don't let fuzzy ideas like that. Once we've seen slip through the net, instead, always aim to make sure that every point is abundantly and unambiguously clear to as many of your readers as possible. Okay, next, we're going to look at how writing can lose clarity when we don't take enough care with how and where replace words in a sentence. 23. How to make your writing sharp: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you the importance of taking extreme care with how you order words in a sentence. Doing this will ensure that your sentences are more accurate in general, which will allow readers to follow your writing with ease. But it will also enable you to make the meaning razor sharp. And that will allow them to follow along effortlessly to make your sentences razor-sharp is perhaps the highest aspiration you can have when it comes to clarity, I'd recommend squarely focusing on that goal. Now stepping back a bit, I want you to understand that the question of where and how you position words in a sentence is a really big one. In the realm of clarity. If you get it wrong, you'll end up with our best unclear sentences and at worst, misleading ones. In the study of grammar, you may have come across what is referred to as a misplaced modifier. Well, let me try to explain to you here what is common sensical and top ten non-technical away as possible? What it is, because it's central to what we're discussing. A modifier basically is a word or perhaps a set of words that altered in some way something else that's mentioned in the same sentence. So in this example, deborah drove erotically to the market. We have one word that modifies another word in the same sentence, which is the modified word. Well, that's right. The modified word is drove because we've got the other word erotically, which is altering or adding something to the meaning of the word drove. In that sentence. The word erotically modifies or affects the meaning of drove because it tells us the way in which Deborah drove. That is erotically, if that's the meaning of a modifier, a word that modifies and other than what's a misplaced modifier? Well, as you might guess, it's where the modifying word is placed in such a way in a sentence that it makes it unclear which word It's actually modifying. Now the problem can happen because simply the modifying word is a bit too far away from the word or the phrase that it's trying to modify. As here, Deborah drove to the market after dumping her phone onto the passenger seat erotically. Now of course, it may not be too difficult for some people to figure out the author's meaning. But placing the word erotically at the end there makes it unclear as to whether it's referring specifically to the manner in which Deborah drove erratically or to Deborah's act of placing her phone on the passenger seat erratically, even though that doesn't really quite sound right, does it? Now, you can fix that type of problem pretty easily. You simply bring them worthy radically closer to the word that you intend for it to modify like this. Debra drove it radically to the market after dumping her phone onto the passenger seat. And that's a lot clearer, right? Okay. Now consider this next sentence. Our friendly staff will neatly collect and pack your items. What's the problem there? That's right, the sentence is out-of-focus and thus unclear. Again, because the modifier neatly is only meant really to apply to the term pack. Whereas here it's made to appear as though it applies to the other term, collect as well. Have a go at rewriting the sentence and place the modifier neatly, correctly to make the meaning of the sentence clearer. Well, okay, here's one way the sentence could read for more clarity. Our friendly staff will collect your items and pack them neatly. Now, little manipulations like this are going to steadily improve both the power and the beauty of your prose considerably, but not only that, by learning to place your words with extreme care like this, you can sometimes avoid major misunderstandings. Just look at this sentence. Marcus almost studied ten hours for the exam. Well, if mark is almost studied for ten hours, it could mean that he didn't in fact study at all, right. So where would you move the modifier almost to give that sentence more clarity? That's right. Marcus studied almost ten hours for the exam. Now taking this kind of care with the placement of words to best deliver your meaning will ensure you always provide a smooth and pleasant reading experience to your audience. Now that we've seen the tremendous harm that misplaced modifiers can do to your writing. We're going to go on to look at the biggest clarity killer of all, something called ambiguity. 24. How to make your writing specific: In this lesson, we're going to look at how to make your writing clearer in yet another way by making it more specific. Now, specificity is important because it also makes comprehension of what we write much more easy. But being specific is also important because as before, it prevents your sentences from being misinterpreted. What do I mean by be more specific or write more specifically? Well, a lot of writing out there tends to be hard to understand easily because it's what we call ambiguous. What is ambiguous mean? Well, ambiguities is just when a reader is left unsure as to what you mean exactly. Because what you say allows for more than one possible interpretation. Now, you may be beginning to notice that there is some crossover between the concepts of making your writing precise, making your writing sharp, and making your writing specific. Ambiguity is one of those problems that actually cuts across all three concepts, which is why we touched on it in the previous lessons on clarity. But here I want to look at how it relates particularly to the idea of being highly specific about what you're saying. Take this seemingly innocent sentence whose meaning may have seemed obvious enough to the person who wrote it. My oldest students know I'm extremely careful with my language. Did you read it and know exactly what the author meant by older here. There's nothing wrong about the placement of words here, modifiers or not. The issue, the ambiguity is in the actual use of the word itself. In this case, the word older. Older students may refer either to people who've been students of this person for a long time. Or the writer could be referring to students who are more advanced of age and therefore older in that sense of the word. Now sometimes the contexts may make your meaning clear enough. And in such cases you don't really need to obsess about such a sentence too much. But if that context isn't there for a reader, you're potentially going to lose them because it creates. That's right and ambiguity. As a reader, it can often be downhill from there. Not only could they misunderstand sentences that follow because of this initial ambiguity, but worse, the reader may also lose confidence in you as the writer and judge negatively the credibility of your writing as a whole. They may wonder if you've thought through the issue with enough clarity, your authority in that case could be squandered in an instant. Now when I talk about needing to deal forcefully with any type of ambiguity in your writing, I'm going, actually going to set a very high bar for you. I want you to take care to ensure that your readers can never be in any doubt as to what you mean in a sentence. In other words, aim to eliminate any shade of doubt as to your meaning. As difficult as it often is. Take this sentence. The bitter rivalry between Jennifer and Zoe rose to new heights after she wanted to cover to journalism award. Now you might normally brush past a sentence like that without thinking about it too deeply, because you knew that it was Jennifer who won a coveted award and not Zoe. But read it again from the point of view of an ignorant reader who knows both a women in this case, but doesn't know which one of them won the award to that reader. The word she is going to be ambiguous. And that ambiguity could lead to a devastating lack of understanding of stuff that follows, at least until the matter is cleared up in some later sentence. Now, supposing for argument's sake, that it was in fact Jennifer who won the award. I want you to know that you've got at least three options for resolving an ambiguity problem of this type. One option is to make things clear for your readers by directly naming the object about which there is ambiguity, as I've done here, the bitter rivalry between Jenifer and Zoe rose to new heights after Jennifer one, the coveted Journalism award. However, the downside of taking this approach, well, it isn't especially elegant, Is it? Because what you get there is in what journalistic lingo is referred often to a word echo where you basically repeat the object twice in the same sentence. Creating this unattractive echo. It feels a bit clunky and ugly, doesn't it? It's also repetitive and therefore inefficient. Luckily, there's a second way to clear up the ambiguity, and that's by changing the very structure of the sentence. Have a go at doing this yourself. Changing the sentence structure to get more clarity. Maybe start the sentence in a different way and see if that helps to clear things up. How did you do? Did you get something like this? After Jennifer one, the coveted Journalism Award, her bitter rivalry with Zoe rose to new heights. And that resolves our problem perfectly well, doesn't it? Thankfully, though, there's also a third way to resolve ambiguities like this. And that is to characterize Jennifer in this case. Although in some way that readers will easily recognize who we're talking about. Now this depends on what we've already told readers about both of them. But suppose some previous sentences make clear that Jennifer, before she won this award, was once a swimming coach. How might we resolve the ambiguity in the original sentence by making use of this particular information? Well, we could maybe write something like this. The bitter rivalry between Jennifer and Zoe rose to new heights after the swimming coach won the coveted Journalism Award. And that would work too. I could just as well be some other facts about Jennifer that fit smoothly into the sentence. Okay, The other thing I want you to think about in the context of ambiguity is the confusion often caused by the careless use of the word this. Could the following example where the word this may refer back ambiguously to some particular thing. Among many other things that were previously said. This is something we're thinking about. Now it's unfortunately very common for writers to assume that readers will always know exactly what this is referring back to you. But in truth, they often don't know, particularly when a number of different things have been said previously. And that's why sometimes in journalism we call this the lazy. This here is the lazy, this inaction. We spent much of the past year encouraging staff to work in the charity sector while we focused on growing the business, this gave rise to fresh insights for future action. I think about the way this is used in that sentence. Do you notice the ambiguity? Is it completely clear which part of the preceding sentence it's specifically refers to. Know, right? It may refer to work done in the charity sector or two attempts to grow the business, or perhaps to both even. How would you pin down the meaning of that sentence? If we suppose for argument's sake. Again, that the fresh insights really only related to the work that was done in the charity sector. Here's one way of doing it. We spent much of the past year encouraging staff to work in the charity sector while we focused on growing the business. How philanthropy gave rise to fresh insights for future action. Philanthropy, by the way, just means the desire to promote the welfare of others. But like that, always aim to give readers the gift of absolute certainty as to what exactly you're referring them back to. Especially with potentially ambiguous words like this, that, or it. Here's another example of a lazy days, this time from a news article. The move comes as the South Asian nation grapples with power cuts and food shortages due to an economic and foreign exchange crisis. This has led to mass protests demanding Mr. Rajapaksa is resignation. And it's not entirely clear what this stands for here. So there's a difficulty a little bit in interpreting the sentence. The writer has been a bit lazy, right? And what is this, this that led to the mask process? Was it the power cuts and shortages specifically, or was it the economic and foreign exchange crisis specifically? Both of those things are certainly related with each other. But can you see the lack of specificity creates just a bit of a moment of slight confusion for the reader, or at least the lack of certainty. Now how could you make this more specific? Well, how about in this way? The move comes as a South Asian nation grapples with power cuts and food shortages due to an economic and foreign exchange crisis. Growing anger at perceived government inaction over the worsening situation has fueled mass protests demanding Mr. Rajapaksa is resignation. And that's slightly more specific, isn't it? Better at least than the slightly ambiguous this that we had before? So now we've got ambiguity pretty well covered. I've taught you in this lesson how to make sure your words refer to specific things that readers will have no trouble identifying and recognizing. Now ambiguity isn't the only way that not being specific and harm the clarity of your writing. There are other ways writers can be nonspecific. And a big way is the careless use of jargon. You may have noticed certain buzzwords cropping up, particularly in business writing, formal writing, including things like job resumes and cover letters. You've seen such jargon, I'm sure words and phrases like detail oriented, dynamic, individual, proactive market leading, that type of thing. Now, it can be quite annoying seeing such words appear repeatedly in job applications, especially if you're an employer looking to actually hire someone. Why? Because those words often don't mean anything specific. There are quite generic and non-specific. What exactly is a dynamic individual, for example, typically, it's far better to be precise and specific about your background, experience, and accomplishments so that potential employers can easily understand what you mean. This abstract stuff doesn't just appear in resumes and cover letters. As a journalist, I often came across press releases describing a company, for example, it's providing customer-focused solutions or client-centered platforms or value-added services and other. Similar, often meaningless jargon that was nonspecific and therefore painfully unclear. We couldn't repeat those words in the types of newspapers that I have written and edited for. I've seen websites describing a company, for instance, is having an outcomes-based orientation or various systems aligned procedures or access to market leading analytical tools. Often these are just puffed up words that don't mean very much at all. The writer may think they've been clever and persuasive. After all, they think everyone, everyone around them says this type of thing, so it must be good, right? But usually this sort of dead language leave readers a bit dumbfounded because they don't actually refer to anything specific at all. In short, it's not as impressive as it might sound, and it's not usually memorable stuff either because everyone is using it. For example, would you easily understand this jargon laced sentence that you may find on a company's website. We are the global market leading provider in the wireless space, offering state-of-the-art value-added solutions to satisfied stakeholders across the globe. You see that type of thing a lot as a journalist. But wouldn't it be a lot clearer if the company just said, we're the world's biggest and most advanced mobile phone operator. So try generally to avoid vague jargon, jargon words like value-added solutions, stakeholders, and other buzzwords like that. If they aren't useful or specific, there might be the rare occasion when they could be the best option, but they definitely shouldn't be the default option. Instead, go for language that pins down perfectly well. And very specifically, what it is that you mean, which is better. I'm a dynamic individual and best-in-class team player dedicated to evolving an innovative approach to managing workflow environments in the marketing space of the travel industry. Or I'm the Lead graphic designer for the marketing team at Flight Center, Australia's biggest travel agent. Every word there is loaded with meaning. So please learn to spot Whenever you carelessly defaulting jargon or buzzwords that don't mean much. Challenge yourself to always be clear, concrete, specific about what you mean. The good news is that weeding out jargon will make your work stand out hugely from much of the terrible business, official and online writing out there. Okay, so that about wraps up our discussion of clarity, the ingredient that gives brightness, sharpness to your prose. Remember that if you want to explore deeper this realm of clarity, I encourage you to look up my course writing with flair, where offer numerous other tactics for boosting the clarity of writing. There are many more, but for now, we're ready to begin exploring the next ingredient in the secret sauce, which is elegance. It's the special ingredient that brings yet another important set of qualities to your writing. Most importantly, a sense of orderliness and gracefulness. But before we get onto elegance, I want to set you a challenge to help you absorb the principles learned in this clarity part of the course. Go and edit your resume or a cover letter that you've sent in the recent past. Focus on making it crystal-clear and razor-sharp. Start by ensuring that no sentence is fuzzy where words could be better placed. Iron out any ambiguities. You find there, locate any jargon words or business buzzwords and replace them with language that's more specific. Perform the same steps with the writing on a random company website. 25. The magic of elegance: The power of simplicity, as we saw, is that it makes your writing light, fast and punchy instead of slow and heavy. Next, I introduced you to the power of territory, the quality that makes your writing crisp, sharp, and focused. The power of elegance, the third ingredient in the secret sauce is that it helps to make your writing orderly and graceful. And in the coming lectures, I'm gonna be showing you how to apply this ingredient of elegance so that you're writing begins to flow a lot better. As a result, your pros will take on more gracefulness and poise, which will give readers a more joyful experience. Now, I just want you to imagine for a moment what can happen when the ingredient of elegance is added to simplicity and clarity? The first two ingredients, it is enough to create enormous power in your writing because when these three ingredients come together, the results get to be really magical and musical. You see the ingredients of simplicity and clarity can help make your writing in turn more succinct and more focused. But elegance is that almost mystical quality that can make a person go wow, that was just beautiful to read. Now that feeling of this is beautiful, stems from three things. First, it has to do with the way the writing is organized or arranged. In other words, its narrative structure. Secondly, it has to do with the way the writing moves. In other words, it's music or its rhythm. And finally, it has to do with the way the writing is presented visually. I mean, the way it actually looks on the page, which can also be beautiful or ugly. With this ingredient of elegance, we're getting deeper into what I call the artistic realm of writing. And here it's all about seeing a writing not merely as a piece of text anymore, but more like a composition and more like a work of art that you're creating. You might see your writing almost like sheet music where every note, every pores and every accent is gracefully aligned to create something that flows along gorgeously, like the booming voice of a perfectly integrated orchestra. Now I'm going to begin this exploration of the concept of elegance in writing by looking at its presentational aspect. That is the beauty of writing on the page and aspect that's unfortunately too often overlooked by writers, not only in academia and business, but also these days online. As you'll soon learn when it comes to writing. In addition to personality, looks do often matter. 26. How to make your writing tidy: Few writers these days pay enough attention to the aesthetics of how they're writing looks on the page. After this lesson, you won't be one of those messy writers. Indeed, you're going to know how to spit and polish up your text so that they end up being as pleasing to the eye as they are to the ear. Now there are many ways to make, to help make your writing look more elegant. A presentational standpoint. At the most basic level, you want to clean up any obvious messiness in your copies starting with typos, spelling, punctuation mistakes. But beyond such obvious messiness, there are other things to look out for, things like inconsistency or a lack of symmetry on the page itself. For instance, do check that all of your headings and subheadings are in the same type of font. Perhaps you change the font at some point, left one heading accidentally out of the change, that creates a mess. And those headings and subheadings all exactly the same size and style as each other. For instance, bold, italicized, underlined, or whatever else you've chosen. Are all headings 20 and all subheadings exactly 10 or whatever else. You've decided that they should be. Go back and check that they're consistent. Such details can be hard to notice at first, but you'll get better at noticing them with time. As you become more experienced, you'll get better at keeping that matter of consistency in your mind. Even as you write. At any rate, you really have to get past thinking of these things as irrelevant or no big deal. Sure, your content may be great. But if it looks a mess, either in terms of typos and spelling mistakes or in terms of consistency and so on. It will look as though not much care has gone into it and that takes away some credibility and authority. And it's just simple good manners really. I like to think of it as similar to not caring whether your clothes are left all over the floor as opposed to being carefully stacked away in your wardrobe, neatly ordered. Making go really deep into this concept of consistency. And it's something that professional proofreaders are real experts and noticing they'll go to the trouble of looking for and fixing an opening quotation mark that's somehow different in font-style from the closing quote mark. Something like that might barely be noticeable even to the human eye. Still, they want the professionalism that emanates from having perfect consistency. Professional proofreaders on newspapers and books, believe it or not, will hunt down and fix a mere comma that might have got gone accidentally italicized after an italicized word. Yeah, I'm not kidding. In fact, I do that. In truth, few writers can bring themselves to care though about such small details. But it's this level of attention to detail that really takes your presentation to another level. Bringing you to your writing a feeling of gracefulness and unity that I believe creates its own resonance. Newspapers style guides often go into detail on these sorts of issues. For that very reason, the need for unity and professionalism. This house style guides discuss everything about how things should look and read everything from how reporters should refer to a particular country, say the US or the USA, to whether particular word should be capitalized in a sentence such as government, or brought together with a hyphen, such as decade's long, versus treating these as two separate words or as even one word. Top newspapers headlines also have their own distinctive styles. Economists, for example, writes its headlines like this. Can the world find a good COVID-19 vaccine quickly enough? The Wall Street Journal may write the same headline like this. Can the world find a good COVID-19 vaccine quickly enough? Notice a difference in the way the words are capitalized in each case. Now as I say, you can go really deep with this. Think about punctuation for example. Do you want to use the so-called Oxford comma in your writing or not? What style of dashes do you want to have? There's a difference, by the way, between em dashes and en dashes that you might want to look into. Anyway, keep those dashes once you've chosen the style that you want, keep them consistent and never mistake them for hyphens because that would look really unprofessional. What is your paragraph style to your paragraphs have a certain average length, or are you happy to have them run wildly in different sizes? Some tiny others huge. To make your presentation as elegant as possible, I suggest you think about creating some sort of house style rules for yourself and try to stick to them, at least throughout an individual piece of writing. You don't have to go as far as newspapers do, but it doesn't hurt to have some style guidelines to help keep your writing looking consistent and therefore on brand. If you introduce someone called Martin evident in your article, for instance, will you refer to that person further down as Mr. evidence, or maybe less formally as Everton, decide on your preference and then try to keep it consistent for every other name that you mentioned in the text too, especially if it's a formal document. That way, you'll create a feeling of unity within the text. You write out numbers from one to nine as words and then use figures for the number ten upwards. Many newspapers do this to prevent writing something as unwieldy as 128, for example, in words, will you allow yourself to begin a sentence number which can look really inelegant and even weird, I never do it. Three people showed up for work that morning, for example, versus three people showed up for work that morning. Will you say there is a 90% chance it will rain today using the percentage symbol? Or will you write per cent out in words? And if so, will you write it as two separate words or as one word? Keep that consistent throughout the text or it will look untidy. Would you write UK and US? And UN with dots in between the letters all the time like this. Or without any dots like this. Keep that consistent as well. Now as you create your own style rules for different types of writing, just remember, the great writing. Like great food, becomes even more tasty when it's presented beautifully. Now, as I said earlier, elegance has a deeper meaning beyond the basic presentation of your content. And the aspect of elegance that I want to focus on next is the elegant ordering of ideas. And that's one of the things that helps make your writing flow along gracefully. 27. How to make your writing graceful: In the previous lesson, we looked at how to present your content more elegantly so that it's both visually appealing and looks more professional. In this lesson, we're going to shift our attention to the actual content of your writing and learn how to organize it to help it flow better, which is also a key aspect of elegance in writing. Now by the end of the lesson, you'll know how to turn your narratives into elegantly organized blocks of ideas that flow forward gracefully from start to finish. Now, have you ever read a piece of writing that you felt flowed really well? One reason for that, apart from the rhythm of the writing was probably because the ideas in the text, we're organized beautifully. In other words, it's likely the writing had an elegant structure. I like to call this quality narrative elegance. Narrative elegance is one of the main distinguishing features of exceptional writing. Not many writers get it or even consider it. But you will soon. Let's begin by considering first what a narrative actually is. Anything you write, a blog post, or a book, a report, or an essay has a narrative. It just means that the material is organized, structured, arranged, or put together in a certain way. Now there are really so many ways you can organize a narrative. But most high-quality writing will have some kind of organizational structure to it. A piece of texts could be organized into simple sections that, for example, reflect steps in a process. You might find this in a step-by-step meal recipe that's divided into one ingredients first, then to preparation than three, the cooking method. And for that, you know how to play plate things up. There. Each section contains its own unique type of details and that has a logical flow those steps, doesn't it? Or consider a piece of business analysis that methodically moves from one topic area to another in a logical or otherwise meaningful order. A narrative might also be organized into an evolving argument type of thing where the writing moves along a certain pathway of ideas towards a final conclusion. Or it could be starting with an executive summary and then going into the details after that. Either way, it's usually helpful to have this kind of bird's eye view of the type of narrative that you're creating or working with. By which I mean, you should try to get a clear picture of the underlying structure. Now, I'll go into more depth on this topic in a different section of the course where it comes up again. But for now, think of a cover letter for a job. Now cover letter might break down into four basic blocks of ideas. For instance, like this. One block says, why I'm applying for the job. And other Locke says My relevant background and experience and other blocks, Here's what I think I could bring to the role. And other block says, explain what you're seeking, which is usually like an interview or to meet up. These four categories have a certain inherent logic when arranged in that particular way, the ideas flow elegantly into one another in sequence. But if you were to mix those categories up, you could end up with something far less elegant or even quite messy and illogical. For fun, try putting in some details for each category and making those four categories flow as badly as you can. And you'll soon see what I mean by narrative elegance. The important thing is that when you start to see your narratives in terms of blocks of ideas or sections like this, you can then begin to work on ordering those blocks of ideas in the most elegant or stylish way possible. And it's through that process, the ordering of blocks of ideas elegantly that you begin to get what's called narrative flow. Now, I just want to quickly point out that narratives can be a lot more sophisticated than the basic linear types that I've talked about so far. And I encourage you in fact, to study new stories, feature articles, and commentary to help hone your narrative awareness. You will find that most good writing has an elegant narrative that holds it all together and that propels it forward. As I said, we return to this topic in more depth later. But for now I hope you get the basic concept of narrative elegance from what I've imported here, which is enough for now. Now, apart from the elegant ordering of ideas, there is another way to get your writing to flow better. Do you know how? It's by focusing on the way the words and sentences move their rhythm. I'm talking about the music of your writing. That's what we're going to look at in the next lesson on the third ingredient, elegance. 28. How to make your writing musical: In this lesson, you're going to discover that there is another layer of elegance that you can add to your writing that will also help to make it flow. Well. It's a concept that I sometimes call musicality. Once you understand this concept of musicality, you'll be able to give you a writing, what many writers like to refer to as rhythm. I'm talking about the quality of that turns a clunky sounding piece of writing into something that dancers along beautifully or that seems to you. Now, when you have this musical quality running through your words, sentences, and paragraphs, that is when you're writing really begins to take on the so-called wow factor. The trouble, however, is that musicality and rhythm are really difficult concepts to explain in the context of writing, even though many of us will easily recognize them when we encounter them. To my students, I often show this excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King's famous, I Have a Dream speech which contains an element of musicality that is hard not to notice and that's why I use it. I'll do it again here. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Now let's share poetry, isn't it? Now look at this where I've tried to put some beats into Dr. Martin Luther King's speech that hopefully gives you some feeling for its rhythmic elegance. And I just let me say that this is not the only way to read the music in the passage, and it may not even be the exact way that Dr. King spoke it. But I do hope that you can at least recognize the poetry that is inherent within the text itself. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. Now just having those lines in there, I hope helps you to feel or get a sense of some of the music in it. You can place the lines in different ways to show it as well, but that's one way. Now, have a look at the following sentence. Spots. What's inelegant or shall we say unmusical about it? Try coset in a statement Tuesday that it had bought Sunrise Technologies. The deal is worth $20 billion. The software company said the acquisition would help you target consumers in Asia. It added that the move would give a significant boost to its profit this year, sunrise is the world's second biggest checkmate. Trichome is a US based company. Sunrise is based in Taiwan. Now hope you noticed that the same subject verb pattern is repeated here continuously throughout. This pattern can feel somewhat monotonous or tedious when reading it aloud. So how about you try playing around with the sentence structure and punctuation a little to give the writing a better rhythm, pause this and have a go. Hope that went well. How about this? Try Co Limited bought Taiwan's Sunrise Technologies in a deal worth $20 billion. In a statement Tuesday, the US software company said the acquisition would help target Asian consumers. Adding that the move could significantly boost this year's profit. Sunrise is the world's second biggest chip maker. And that's better, isn't it? In fact, I encourage you to try treating everything you write or read it from now on as a musical composition, as I said, rather than merely as a block of lifeless text. This composers mindset will help you to get the hang of musicality a lot more quickly. Also try as often as you can spotting the rhythm and music. In other people's writing, look at well-written newspapers like The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, for example, then try to emulate the rhythm that you find there. Play with this concept, practice with it until you finally embedded the concept of rhythm deeply into your own subconscious mind. Okay, now I want to briefly take this concept of rhythm just a little bit further and show you how you can improve the elegance of your writing by ensuring that ideas in a sentence are presented in a delightfully parallel way. Just look at this sentence and see if you can tell what's inelegant about it. Joe see is in charge of packing crates, keeping track of outgoing stock, and she maintains records of customer complaints. Notice how the ideas there aren't perfectly parallel. And notice how this gives the sentence a bit of a clunky feeling. Have a go yourself first at making the ideas more parallel. Well, how about this? Josie is in charge of packing crates, keeping track of outgoing stock, and maintaining a record of customer complaints. There you have the verbs packing, keeping track of, and maintaining a record, lining up in a perfectly parallel way, thereby giving the sentence more of a gracefulness. And finally, if you can spot the inelegant in this type of sentence, apply for a loan online or a branch near you. Now, a reader may well understand what the writer of that sentence means. The writer means you can apply for a loan either online or at a nearby physical branch. But why is it inelegant? Well, look at the structure of the sentence, which is trying to distinguish two different things, right? But where the connection made isn't exactly perfect. Macdonald, very pretty. You can see this when we slow it down and look more closely, apply for a loan online or apply for a loan. A branch near you. Can you see how the apply for a loan part connects perfectly with online, but not so perfectly with a branch near you. And that's because there's a word missing. Do you know what it is? That's right. The word is at, which is needed to connect the two parts of the sentence. More elegantly, apply for a loan online or at a branch near you. The sentence now lines and reads in a more balanced and graceful way, doesn't it? It clicks into place. Okay, so I hope that this series of lectures on elegance has given you a better idea of how to write your sentences, structure your narratives, and present your content in a more elegant and thus flowing way. Before we get onto the fourth and final ingredient in the secret source evocativeness. Please take on this short challenge as it will help you to embed the learnings from this series of lectures on elegance. Find an article from a website. You'll find a reading or something that you've written in the past, tried to notice any inconsistencies that make the writing inelegant, including a lack of any house style. Afterwards, break down the sections of the narrative into abstract categories and consider whether those parts have been arranged elegantly or could be better organised. Finally, assess whether the writing is musical enough and try to edit it so that it takes on a better rhythm. 29. The magic of evocativeness: I hope you enjoyed learning about the powerful ingredient of elegance in the previous few lectures about simplicity and clarity before that as well. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to apply the fourth ingredient, evocativeness to your writing to give it even more of a beautiful depth and dimension. By the end, you'll know how to turn dull and colorless writing into prose that is vivid and stimulating. But first, I hope that by now you're beginning to appreciate how the four ingredients, simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness, all come together to create high-quality pros. Let me help put it into perspective again, simplicity, as we saw, turns slow and heavy writing into prose that is light, fast, and punchy. One type of enhancement or one type of beauty, if you like. Next, is the enhancement brought about by focusing on clarity, which turns hazy and fuzzy writing into process sharp and razor focused. Elegance then comes into play. And it transforms writing that is messy and clunky into this nicely organized. And that moves along gracefully. Basically. It turns it into writing the flow as well. Now, evocativeness is really the missing piece of the puzzle. You see you can have writing that's punchy, crisp and graceful. The three qualities that come from focusing on simplicity, clarity, and elegant. But it could still be lacking that crackle, that flare. This is also sufficiently evocative. In other words, stimulating evocative writing is basically writing that fires up your imagination and agitates or moves your emotions because it's colorful, vibrant, forceful, expressive, and passionate to help you get a better idea of the power of this concept of evocativeness. Take a look at the richness of evocative detail, not to mention the musicality in this line from a Nabokov novel, which I often quote, the males of the Firefly, a small luminous beetle, more like a wandering star. Then a winged insect appeared on the first warm black Knights of artist, one-by-one here and there. Then in a ghostly multitude dwindling again to a few individuals as their quest came to its natural end. And also look at this evocative passage from the child in time by the novelist Ian McEwan. Beyond the bed was the window through which they could see the moon sinking into a gap in the pines. Directly above the moon was a planet. It was miles. Judy said it was a reminder of a harsh world. For now however, they were immune. It was before the beginning of time. And they lay watching planet and moon descend through a sky that was turning blue. Now I probably don't need to point out that you don't necessarily need to have this ingredient evocativeness in, for instance, run-of-the-mill business writing or in official government communications. Your writing will usually come off as professional and polished enough with just simplicity, clarity, elegance at work, but evocativeness if you add, if added skillfully to your writing in a restrained way and in the correct doses can add a shine. Even to ordinary business writing, helping to turn dull gray copy into something much more engaging, captivating, and invigorating. And I want to start by looking in the following lesson at the concept of variety, a key ingredient of evocativeness. And I want to show you how applying this idea of variety to your writing can infuse it with a greater liveliness and energy. 30. How to make your writing varied: In this lesson, I'm going to explain how to make your writing more evocative by focusing on the concept of variety. By the end of the lesson, you'll know how to make skillful tweaks to your words and sentences to make your writing spring to life because it's so packed with variety. Now, as you know, anything gets boring when it's repeated too often. And the same is true in writing, which can very dull when you keep on using the same words, the same sentence structures and similar language patterns over and over. For practice, try changing both the sentence structure and the same words in this passage to create as much variety as possible. Standard and Poor's said, Australia's top credit rating was largely safe from any future disruption to the world economy. Standard and Poor's said that with it's extremely low debt levels, the country had time on its side to deal with any such disruption to the world economy in the latest potential disruption to global financial markets, China's said today, that is, economy had grown more weakly than expected. Okay, How did it go? Well, how about this? Standard and Poor's said Australia's top credit rating was largely safe from any future disruption to the world economy. With its extremely low debt levels, the country had time on its side to deal with any such jolt. The rating agency said, in the latest potential blow to global financial markets, China's said today that its economy had grown more weakly than expected. In terms of sentence structure, I've moved the attribution, Standard and Poor's to the end of the second sentence instead of at the start of it, like in the first sentence, I've also referred to it as the ratings agency, so as not to repeat Standard and Poor's. As far as other words go, I've omitted the second mention of world economy, which was to say me and I used alternative words for disruption throughout, specifically blow and jolt. I could also have used shocks or bumps are plenty of other words as alternatives to. Now, when it comes to word variety, it can be handy to keep an inventory of alternative words for the most common scenarios, which you can use for extra variety in whatever you write, you can always consult a thesaurus anyway. But as a journalist, I also found it helpful to keep an inventory of alternative words, especially if you find that in the type of writing that you mostly do, you're constantly repeating the same sorts of words. For instance, instead of repeating accompany name like British Airways, British Airways, British Airways all the time, you could switch it up with other descriptors occasionally such as the company, the firm, the carrier, the UK based airline. To avoid that sameness. If you're writing about financial markets, you may find that you tend to use the words rose and fell a lot in your commentary when referring to say market gains or market drops. And if so, note that you have alternatives of varying strength, which can also help you to get your meaning across. More precisely, such as increased climbed, gained, added, advanced search, jumped, and sword. Those are some alternatives for rows. Or instead of saying markets fell repeatedly, you have the options of varying intensity. Again like decreased, declined, dropped, depth slipped, sank, plunged, tumbled. Now, don't feel that you have to use an alternative word every time though, often varying things too much draws too much attention to itself. You may sometimes want to use the default word fell more often than say, a more conspicuous word like tumbled or plunged. It's really okay to have a few repetitions in there so long as it doesn't get to Samy or too boring, maybe just consider whether it might be better to have a bit of distance between the various times that you use the same words such as rose or fell or the company or whatever to make the writing more stimulating. Having variety in there like this makes your writing less dry and less doll in general. I hope at least that you've seen that. So I encourage you to go out there and experiment as much as you can with the concept of variety and observe just how much flare it can bring to your writing. Next up, a second way to make your writing more evocative by making it more forceful. Now come with me and I'll show you what I mean. 31. How to make your writing forceful: We just saw how to add more variety to your words and sentences to make your writing more stimulating. In this lesson, I want to look at another way that you can make your writing more stimulating, which is by increasing its forcefulness. To start with, there are a bunch of words that writers often use carelessly that significantly weaken the power of their pros. And I want to make sure that you know how to avoid this sort of weak writing. There's a certain class of weak words we often default to mostly out of habit or maybe because we're so used to seeing them so often in other people's writing. And so we assume that it's the appropriate way to say things. However, when we litter our copy with these low-power words, as I call them, can take away quite a bit from the evocativeness of your writing. You may have heard them referred to by others as filler words or hedging words. I'm talking about words like somehow somewhat, a little, rather arguably quite. And I think, or I believe now they're words that we often use naturally when speaking. And I know I've used them in this course, but they can also sometimes creep into our writing. When we first attempt to write our thoughts down, making some of our sentences feel less strong. Whenever you spot one of these weak words in your writing, I recommend you at least consider whether it's worth getting rid off and try it out. For example, look at this sentence. I was somewhat irritated by the way she spoke to me. Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with using the word somewhat there. It may even help to make your writing more precise in some contexts, or it may add a touch of elegance or music to a sentence. At other times. It's okay to use it if it does that, and you like that effect. Similarly, the word somehow might give you the exact humble tone that you wish to convey in that sentence. For instance, to make it sound less blonde or less harsh sounding, whatever it is that you're saying. But you should always at least consider whether such a word is strictly necessary or useful. After all, technically speaking, what's the difference between somewhat irritated and just irritated? If you're somewhat irritated or you just simply irritated, is the question of degree you're trying to convey. There may be so, but if not, then at least you should try dropping it to see what happens like this. I was irritated by the way she spoke to me. Now as anything lost for having taken the word somewhat out of the sentence, likely not. In fact, as you can see, the sentence actually sounds more bold and more forceful. Without it, the sentence grabs your attention more this way. It's terse. Here's another quick example to show you how hedging and filler words can weaken your writing. I would argue that Microsoft's new strategy is a bit risky. Expressions like I would argue, I believe, I think. And a bit can often make your writing field limp. And you can really feel the difference in the impact as soon as you rewrite the sentence without those weak words in it. Microsoft's new strategy is risky. See how much more robust and bold that now sounds. So beyond the guard for these seemingly innocent phrases that can often slip through the net and take power away from your writing. After all, people often assume that this is your own thoughts, your own belief, your own view, or your own opinion when you artery. So you don't need to continuously take the bite out of your sentences. Spelling it out. I think this I believe this occasionally, okay, continuously, I'd suggest not. Now, reducing your use of weak words can certainly give your writing a big boost, but there's something else you can easily do to make readers sit up and take notice. You can create pictures for them. And in the next lesson, I'll be showing you how to do that to make your writing even more evocative. 32. How to make your writing colourful: We just saw how you can make your writing more evocative and stimulating by getting rid of weak words that diminish its forcefulness. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to boost the evocativeness of your writing in another way by creating pictures for your readers, and more generally, by making it more colorful and vivid. By the end of the lesson, you'll know how to make the subtle tweaks needed to bring out the latent power of otherwise dreary and lifeless sentences. Now, over the years, I've learned that you can easily add drama to a piece of writing by creating compelling and colorful pictures in a reader's mind. And to achieve this impact, at the very minimum, you need to focus on two crucial things, players and action. That's because both players and action, along with any physical objects that are referred to in a sentence, are things that you can actually see in your mind's eye while you're reading. Seeing those things automatically makes your writing more stimulating. I'll show you what I mean. Suppose you stumble upon this dreary sentence in a college prospectus. If coursework is attended to diligently over the next three years, high-powered jobs are likely to become more accessible upon graduation. And you know, one reason why that sentence isn't very stimulating to read is because it's hard to visualize much in there. Watch your mind as you read those words, trying to find something, some image to grab onto. Who are the people, the players, and where is the action. Now, the good news is that you can easily turn that sentence into something more impactful by simply drawing attention to the people and action that are buried within it. So have a go at doing that yourself first. How about this? Students who apply themselves diligently to their coursework over the next three years will find it easier to land high-powered jobs once they graduate. Now that song, especially snappy sentence, I'd agree, but it's better than the original, horribly abstract one, isn't it? At least there you can see people and action. If you would apply some simplicity tactics to the new sentence, you may end up with something even tighter. Try it. Okay, Well, how about this? Students who work hard tend to get the best jobs? The important thing to note here is that we've taken an abstraction from the original one and turned it into a picture. Even hear students working hard and getting the best jobs, That's the picture. Whereas high-powered jobs are likely to become more accessible upon graduation. Well, that gives much less of a picture, doesn't it? Now, it's this kind of literary surgery that can bring your writing suddenly to life and make it jump out in your audience's faces. Another way to create compelling pictures for your readers is to drill down into the details of a particular scene that you're describing. What do I mean? Drill down? Well, look at the following centers where though you do have a focus on players and action, the description is still rather dry. Police took strong measures to confront the violent and disorderly conduct of dozens of people at last night's protest. It's not the most colorful or dramatic of descriptions of an event, is it? How might you rephrase the sentence to make it more stimulating? For the sake of this exercise, let's suppose that the protest involved a violent all night clash where protesters were throwing objects at the police who were on horses with dogs by their side. Visualize the scene as it could have occurred, and then try to describe it vividly and as dramatically as possible in one strong sentence. Okay. How did it go? How about this? Mounted police officers accompanied by snarling dogs, battled throughout the night to disburse dozens of angry bottle wielding protestors. You get the idea right. Hopefully you had something similar or perhaps even better. Now to be clear, I'm not saying this type of dramatic language is always appropriate for the footwear, all types of nonfiction writing that you might do. But it is helpful to have this understanding so that you can flex your creative muscles whenever you wish in order to grab the reader's attention with colorful and visual descriptions. Now speaking of creating pictures, I wanted to mention that there is a way of writing sentences that can affect how a picture forms in a reader's mind. While reading, you may have heard what people sometimes call a passive sentence. And it's helpful to know the impact that passive sentences have on the reading experience. Not that you should never use them, but just to know the impact. In particular, passive sentences make images for more slowly in the mind. They take longer to process, thus making the writing to some degree less evocative. Here's a passive centers mat, the owner of the business was advised by the scrawny looking consultant that he should quickly hire a new accountant. Now, do you find that a little bit hard to get a picture of quickly because Of the way the sentence and more specifically the events are structured. We say sentence there is passively structured. Now, I find it useful to think about passive sentences as before in terms of players and action? So let's ask ourselves, who are the players, the CEO, the consultant, and the encounter. And where's the action? Well, one of the players, the consultant is telling another player, the CEO, Matt, to take another action, to quickly hire new accountant. So to get this picture very strong and effective, what would be the best order in which to present the action? Well, I think it would be to have the consultant advising the CEO to go get a new account and quickly. If so, then how might you rewrite the sentence to capture this more natural flow of events? Here's how I do it. The scrawny looking consultant, advise Matt, the owner of the business, that he should quickly hire a new accountant. Notice, even though visually the sentence isn't all that stimulating per se, how the image there pops into your mind in a more natural way than perhaps the original one, which required a little bit more processing. And that's the reason why many people say active sentences or more impactful usually than passive ones, they create a more instant picture in your mind. Now I should point out that there are instances where passive sentences may be preferable perhaps for clarity or for elegance, or even other evocativeness reasons. Indeed, I do often use them for some good reason. You may want to have the business owner as the main subject of the sentence, for instance, but use carelessly in your business or blog writing. Passive sentences were more often harm your writing than help it. So with that, we conclude our exploration of the four ingredients of exceptional writing. I'll take this moment to encourage you to keep these four ingredients in the front of your mind whenever you're writing or editing anything, say them together with me. The four ingredients are simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. The final thing I'd say about them is to remember to use them in a balanced way. Don't be surprised, as I said, if sometimes you're forced to sacrifice one ingredient for another, or to choose between two different tactics that belong to the same ingredient. It's all part of the artistry of writing. Take the equity analyst who's writing a quick note to investors about the stock that suddenly looks good too by investors need to know about this attractive stock as quickly as possible. Therefore, simplicity and clarity way much more heavily in this note to investors than say, elegant or evocativeness. It will matter less, for instance, that it reads like a piece of music. And you may even choose to create short bullet points, as I said, to get the message across fast. On the other hand, and evocative headline that calls investor's attention to this new high-value trade, could make sure that they don't miss the note in their inbox. Whereas I'm boring headline, maybe too easily overlooked. I hope you get the idea. Basically, I want you to see that an elite writer doesn't just pile on the four ingredients into a text without thinking very carefully about it. It's an artistic judgment. Every time. Unlike an artist, the elite writer will delicately balanced the four ingredients in a way that's most appropriate to the situation and the context. And sometimes where there is a clash of ingredients or a conflict between tactics. They'll make wise and careful decisions regarding which ingredient to emphasize, to compromise or to sacrifice. To help explain how compromises are made. Look at this tweet. Sometimes someone is like, I'm a people pleaser and it's like, okay, the people around you do not seem pleased. Now, the sentence isn't as clear as it perhaps could be because the punctuation is really bad from a technical standpoint. That is, by here's a case where the poor punctuation actually almost makes the tweet funnier. And that's almost the point of it, isn't it? Now that tweet break some more of our style rules too, It's not especially clear or simple, e.g. or elegant. It has unnecessary capital letters in it. But all that again, is done for the sake of humor here, which is really a type of evocativeness. And therefore, it doesn't matter that the other ingredients have been sacrificed for that. Here's another example. I have completed the inclusion of two additional bonus lectures to the course to help you understand simplicity more thoroughly. Now that's not very simple, clear, elegant, or evocative, Is it? As a sentence? How could you potentially make it more simple? I like this. I've added two bonus lectures to the course to help better explain simplicity. And here's how you could make it perhaps less simple, but a little more clear. I've added two bonus lectures to the course to help better explain the concept of simplicity as it relates to your writing. Here's how you can make the centers more elegant. To help explain the concept of simplicity more thoroughly, I've added two bonus lectures to the course. Musically that might work better. Here's how you could perhaps make it more evocative. I've just added two bonus simplicity lectures. Enjoy your shiny new course upgrade. I hope you get the idea each ingredient, not just you into making different types of changes. And you will to an extent, need to follow your instincts and consciously choose the best way to balance the four ingredients to suit your purposes. I'll just say that since all the ingredients are there to help make your writing more beautiful in different ways. I would generally advise that for most types of nonfiction writing, you do seek to maximize each of the four ingredients as much as possible, and then later sacrifice as needed. You'll get the hang of this the more that you do it. And so now, with these foundational writing concepts under our belts, and along with the mindset principles we discussed beforehand, we're ready to move onto the next part of this course where I'm going to introduce you to the second powerful writing perspective that I promised to talk to you about. I call this perspective the deep editing framework. Once you've learned this framework, you'll have even more power at your fingertips to Write with Style, flare, an impact. But before we proceed, here's a quick challenge to help embed the concepts you've learned in this evocativeness section of the course. Retrieve something you've recently written and rework it to create more variety in its sentence structure, more forcefulness in the language, and to add more pictures and drama. 33. Editing with flair: Before we continue on with our journey, I want you to take a deep breath and congratulate yourself for coming this far on this incredibly challenging journey. Let's also take a moment to stop and think about what you've learned so far. After exploring the mindset of elite writers, I taught you a powerful perspective that will help to dramatically improve your writing. And I call that perspective the secret source of good writing. And I told you that this secret source was made up of four ingredients that would help you to write with impeccable style. And those ingredients you remember, simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. I also told you that it was important to know not only how to optimize those four ingredients in your writing, but also how to balance them for the best results. Compromising, maybe even sacrificing one ingredient for another whenever necessary. Now in this section I'm going to introduce you to a second really powerful writing perspective. And it's one that I refer to as my deep editing system. Because it's great for editing anything including your own and other people's writing. The system involves looking at your writing not through the lens of the four ingredients, but through the lens of four dimensions. And that's why I also call this perspective the four dimensions of exceptional pros. Now, there is some natural crossover between this and the secret source framework, as you will soon begin to see. But as a framework though, it has its own utility too, because when you see writing through this lens, it's going to give you new insights. Even if some of the ground that the two perspectives cover is similar. Now, this deep editing framework that I'll be teaching you in this section allows you to edit a piece of writing very thoroughly, indeed, much more thoroughly, in fact, than a copy editor might do. Who's just checking a document for spelling, grammar, punctuation mistakes or typos. In other words, this framework goes much deeper. So what is this deep editing framework? And what are these four dimensions of writing? Well, first off, there is the content dimension of your writing. That's a dimension all by itself. When we say content, we're referring to the actual content. What you're saying in your writing, the idea is you're expressing the points, you're making, the questions you're asking in the text, the arguments you're raising, or maybe countering. That's what I mean by your content, is the actual stuff in the piece of writing itself. Now, to make your content dimension better, there are a bunch of useful questions that you could ask about it to enable you to bring it up to a higher standard. And soon I'll show you what those questions are. The next dimension is the structure dimension of your writing. Now, this should be a bit more familiar to you. Because by structure, what I mean is very similar to the narrative that I had discussed in a previous section. When you're editing, it's useful to see this as a dimension of its own because all content, once it's been checked and perfected as much as possible, has to then be organised, which means it has to be placed into a structure that pulls or holes all the content together nicely. So whenever I was editing and other person's writing, I'd always have to check not only that the content was up to scratch, but that the structure was up to a good enough standard. In other words, that it was organized brilliantly. Now I don't need to teach you too much about structure here because I've covered it earlier to a large extent when we looked at creating an elegant narrative, remember, suffice it to say that after you've addressed the content level of your writing, you can similarly ask a bunch of specific questions about the way it's structured in order to improve that dimension as well. And I'm going to show you what those questions are. Okay, the third dimension of a piece of writing after its content and its structure is what I call it style dimension. Once you've ensured the content is great and the structure is great. I'll teach you that. You can also ask a bunch of questions about the style of the writing to improve its quality. And here's where you start to see the crossover again, because the style dimension is really about the four ingredients. Because style is about making a piece of writing read well, and we've seen how to do that already using the simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness framework, haven't we? Now, if you're confused, don't worry, it will all make sense soon. But for now, all you need to do is understand the third dimension of a piece of writing after its content and its structure is its style. And finally, you have a fourth dimension of a piece of writing, and that's what I refer to as its presentation aspect. Here, I'm referring to the more cosmetic side of your writing that again, we touched upon in the secret source lesson on elegant presentation. If you recall that one. Here, it's about looking closely at how your writing is presented to your audience, which is very important, especially if you want your writing to be seen as professional, credible, or authoritative. And this is also why newspapers and book publishers tend to have a very high standard when it comes to the presentation of a piece of writing. Now as with the other three-dimensions, I'm going to be giving you a specific bunch of questions that you can ask about the presentation of your writing that will help to bring that up to a higher standard. So as you see much of this section we'll build upon and integrate stuff that we've learned earlier. But I want you to understand that merely seeing your writing through this lens of four dimensions will once again increase the leverage that you have over the quality of your prose. So there you have the four dimensions of exquisite pros, content, structure, style, and presentation to merge together with the four ingredients of simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. Now I want you to keep this four dimensions framework alive in your mind whenever you are editing anything because I think it's the best one that there is. Now one other thing before we begin exploring the four dimensions of exquisite pros. Although I'll be going through the four dimensions one at a time in practice. I no longer actually do this myself. That's because I know each dimension so intimately from years of editing then I'm able to travel between the dimensions without thinking about them. Much like an experienced driver can drive a car, without having to consciously think about how to change the gears. It becomes pretty much automatic. But for beginners, I'm going to cover each dimension individually so that you can fully appreciate its unique dynamics later, when you become more confident in your editing, U2 will likely operate across all dimensions at once. There's one more thing, as this course is a crash course in writing. Well, there's only so much I can go into in each section of the course. So that's why for anyone whose appetite is stirred and who is hungry to go even deeper into these dimensions, I would consider enrolling in my course editing mastery, which is also available via my website, shiny Roger.com. However, you'll find that what I teach here is enough to give you a writing and editing. A major boost. Come with me and let's explore the four dimensions of exquisite pros. 34. The content dimension of your writing: While I was an editor at The Wall Street Journal, everyday reporters across the world would send me their articles to edit. And when they did so, I'd get to work trying to make the writing in those articles read more simply, clearly, elegantly and evocatively often for a global audience of millions of people. As an editor though, I also looked at articles through another lens, one that helped me to achieve an even better edit. And that was the four dimensions lens that I talked about, where I looked at the dimensions of content, structure, style, and presentation individually. Now, it may help to think of these as four layers that are superimposed on one another. The first of those layers, as I said, is the actual content dimension of your texts, which is what we're going to look at in this lesson. Now, as an exceptional writer, of course, you'll want to make sure that whatever content you're writing or editing meets the highest standard of quality. And to assure, ensure this high level of quality, there are several questions that you can ask and should ask about your content, whatever it may be. And so in this lesson, I'm going to share with you the key questions that I always ask about any content that I'm editing. Now the following list of questions applies really well to news articles in particular, and that's where I tend to ask them most, but I want you to know that you can ask most of these questions are virtually any type of nonfiction writing that you may be working with. And they will still help to refine your content. I'm gonna give these questions to you pretty much as a list with a bit of explanation of each one. Then I want you to go ahead and experiment by asking yourself these questions about any content that you're writing or editing. Okay, the first question to ask about your content is this. What is the purpose of this piece of writing? Now I mentioned the importance of this question at the start of this course when we looked at mindset, right? It's still asking when editing will help you to make sure that the writing you're working on ends up being highly effective, which of course means achieving the purpose for which it's being written. Remember, now, if you've forgotten how to define your purpose in terms of intention and audience, then you may want to revisit that lesson near the start of this course where I explain this idea more fully. But for now, I'll assume you remember. Okay, So once you've defined your purpose, clearly, you can go on to ask the next critical question about the content, which is this. Does every point makes sense? Let's check each sentence for how well it conveys the writers intended meaning and fix any sentence that doesn't make perfect sense to you. Look for any bad explanations, look for sentences that lack key information and therefore make it difficult to interpret them. Look for meaningless gobble, anything really that means that a point doesn't immediately click readers and then fix it or get rid of it. This way, you'll be ensuring that every sentence that's left in your copy has value. For. There's usually no value in a sentence that doesn't make sense. Is there a sentence that doesn't make sense to you or that's not meaningful, most likely won't make sense to anyone else either. The third question to ask about your content is this, is every point relevant to my purpose. If every point or sentence isn't blatantly relevant to your stated purpose that you just stated, then unless it has some other benefit to you, such as providing humor or intrigue, you may want to consider deleting that particular point or sentence from your piece. The fourth question you should ask about your quantities. This is every point worthwhile. Now this is a slightly different question from the previous one because a point could be relevant in that it's related to your purpose, but it may still not be all that worthwhile to keep. It's a more subtle thing we're asking here by asking this question, is every point worth while you're being really thorough and demanding with regard to your content. Just go through each sentence and decide with every single point they make is worth keeping whether it's relevant or not. You may be surprised by what you discover by asking this subtlely different question. Now as a side note, notice how we're almost homing through our content or ironing it out bit by bit, making it sharper and sharper. And that's what I want you to keep in mind. Okay, the next question you want to ask about your content is this, is every point unique. Have you made the exact same point elsewhere in the text? In other words, have you unnecessarily repeated anything? If you've done so, you should strongly consider deleting the repetition unless it serves some other useful purpose for you, such as reminding readers of the point or reinforcing the point for emphasis, which is something I often do in this course. As you can see, I repeat points for emphasis and to help learn and lock in the learning. The next question you should ask about your content is, is every point accurate? In other words, is any sentence dubious or doubtful in terms of its truth or veracity? Would it be worth double-checking whether your facts are in fact true? That is assuming, of course, that you are intending to be truthful. And if you are, then you want to go through each and every point and make sure that you're not saying something that may be false, untrue, or inaccurate. So that's something else you do with content. To bring it up to a higher standard. This particular question focuses your mind on eliminating potential mistakes in your copy that may come back to haunt you and it should inspire you to do some basic fact checking of the text in order to remove anything. They can't be totally backed up. By now with all these questions haven't been addressed, your content should be starting to get into pretty good shape. But there's one final question you could ask of your content and it's, this, is anything missing. Here again, you can refer back to your purpose and ask yourself, is there anything that I could usefully add to the texts that I haven't already included all that the author hasn't already included anything that could strengthen its effectiveness. And if there is, then of course added in. Okay, so those are the key questions I would suggest you ask in relation to your content to ensure that the content dimension of your writing reaches its full potential. As I said, I go through these questions much more detail in editing mastery where, where you also get to edit a piece of content, journalistic content with me. But for now, simply focus on asking these questions whenever editing something and you'll find that the content starts to look considerably more savvy very quickly. As an exercise, go and edit the content dimension of a document you or someone else has written and practice asking these five questions about it. See what changes it yields. 35. The structure dimension of your writing: I just showed you what questions you could ask if the content dimension of your writing to bring it up to a very high standard. The second dimension of your writing where you also want to be asking some deep questions is what I call the structure dimension. As we saw in several other lessons, most content has a structure and so it helps to pay very close attention to this particular aspect of your writing. Now, I know we already looked at structure before in a previous section of the course. So you may be wondering, why am I bringing it up again? What is because you can go even further with structure than I mentioned when I was talking about the narrative awhile ago. Okay, so let's begin. The first question I want you to ask. When you think about the structure of your writing, is this, what is the angle of my content? Now what do I mean by the angle of the content? You see every piece of writing has a particular angle, doesn't it? A news article focuses on some big breaking news. And that's his opening angle. I either news itself, for example, a storm destroyed a village in France over the weekend. Emergency Services reported the angle created there, the storm and its consequences shapes all that will follow to a large degree. After creating that first perspective, the news report will then likely flesh out that angle in the rest of the piece telling us more about the storm and about its consequences, which are the two things alluded to in the opening sentence, the angle. Now the rest of the content, in other words, flows to a large extent from the angle that you create at the beginning. Now what if you had a different angle to the new story? Like this? A village in France is struggling to recover from a storm that occurred over the weekend. Now, that angle would shape the content somewhat differently, wouldn't it? Focusing on the village and its recovery efforts following the storm rather than on the storm and its consequences. It's a slight shift of angle like that. You want to ask whether your particular piece of writing requires an angle, and if so, what that angle should be, it won't always be the case like a news story, but it's a worthwhile question to ask because if it does have an angle, then your angle will help you to shape the content that lies beneath. Take another example. Say you're asked to write a report to your boss on your department's annual performance. Well, the basic angle you may wish to create in that report is, Hey, it's been a great year for for our department. If so, then the report may be divided into the different measurements that you will use to prove the point that it was a great year for the department, rather than say, a dreary list of bullet points in no particular order of what happened over the year according to various metrics. The content is held together. In other words, it's organized based on the angle that you choose at the beginning in many cases. So you want to choose your angle if you have one wisely. Now, your writing may not always have an angle, but it sure helps to ask this question because if it does, it helps to organize the content much more easily. Now next, with the angle figured out, you want to look at the narrative structure as before, in terms of the key underlying or functional categories of a text. So as before, you want to ask this question, this particular question, what are the key categories in my text? In the case of the report to the boss, you may divide the content up in terms of the categories of annual profit, staff turnover, and various other measures of performance that you want to highlight to your boss. Maybe afterwards you'll go into areas that perhaps didn't perform that well. So you're left with a clear, meaningful structure to the information there right? After you have your key categories worked out, as I mentioned before in the narrative elegance lesson of this course, you want to order those key categories of your content in the most elegant way possible. So you may ask, how can I best order those categories or sections to achieve my purpose? And that's where you start placing the categories you have identified in the text into a particular order that is most logical, meaningful, or beautiful in some other way to you. Now once you've ordered the categories into the best order for your purpose, there is one final question we want to ask about the structural dimension of your texts. And it's this are my points ordered well enough within their sections. Now, this question will prompt you to consider whether the individual points that you make in each section of your narrative are themselves in the best possible order. In the annual report example, you would perhaps consider whether all of the individual points you make within, say, the section on staff turnover, our themselves ordered in the best way possible. So here you are creating order within order. If you like, a level of organization that goes far deeper than most people would when they're writing something. Now say you've made five points about staff turnover specifically in your report? Well, it means you would have considered whether those five points are in the best, the most logical, meaningful, or beautiful order possible. Okay, So that completes our look into the structural dimension of writing for the specific purpose of editing a document. Coming up next, the style dimension of your writing. 36. The style dimension of your writing: So far in this section on editing with flair, I've shown you how to address the content and structure dimensions of your writing. In this lesson, I want to focus on the style dimension. And this lesson is gonna be relatively short because writing with style is basically what we've been talking about. Large parts of this course already. You see what we're addressing when we were talking about the style dimension of your writing is the basic question. Does this read? Well, now we've already got the content looking sharp and we've got a good structure in place. But how can we make the whole thing read really well? And that's where the issue of style comes in. And I already hinted earlier in the course at what style is in the context of writing. Deny. Basically style is the ability to create beautiful writing using the four ingredients. In other words, you're writing has style when it's as simple, clear, elegant, and evocative as it can possibly be. Now, I've already told you basically how to achieve style using the four ingredients, the secret sauce. But if you want to know more ways to create simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness in your writing, in addition to the tactics that I've already shared with you here, you are most welcome to have a look at my flagship course writing with flair, where I cover the secret source as well in a lot more detail with more tactics and so on. That's if you're interested in having said that, I want you to know that what I've taught you about the four ingredients in this crash course is good enough really to make your writing look profoundly stylish. Okay, so just for completeness, the first few fundamental questions you want to ask when addressing this style dimension of your writing. Our, as you'd expect, one, can the writing be more simple to, can the writing beam or clear? Three, can the writing be more elegant? And four, can the writing be more evocative? And you must proceed to make it. So using the four ingredients that have already handed to you. Okay, so that covers the style dimension of a piece of writing. In the next lesson, we'll look at the final dimension of a text. The presentation dimension. For me to find out more. 37. The presentation dimension of your writing: Now we've seen that you can see your writing through the lens of dimensions or layers, which is great for editing in particular. And we've already looked at three of those dimensions. The content dimension, this structure dimension, and the style dimension. Once you fixed up content structure style, There's one last dimension to pay attention to in order to really bring it up to the highest level. And that's what I call the presentation dimension. Now this really is the stuff that copy editors, sub editors, proofreaders in newspapers or publishing companies will typically look very closely at, I'm talking about things including grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, typos, that sort of thing, as well as misalignments and inconsistencies in things like headings, fonts, and formatting. Now, this is a dimension of writing that these days sadly, is often overlooked by many, regarded as unimportant and especially in online writing. But I want you to know that a piece of writing that is meticulously presented is one that will often come across as not only more professional but also more credible. For a reader, I think instinctively has more confidence in something that they read when it's not littered with errors. So in language or formatting. So here's your chance to set that side of things straight. Now at some point in your edit, you want to focus all of your attention as a sub editor would to this presentation layer of your prose. Because if you don't put all of your intention into it, you'll likely miss lots and lots of things. Trust me, I've been an editor. And no matter how much you've focused on this dimension of your text, errors will somehow just keep on appearing every time and don't ask me why. So what questions should you ask in relation to the presentation layer of your pros to get that up to the highest level. Well, here's the first, is the spelling, grammar and punctuation. Respectable? That's the most fundamental thing. Now, I'm not saying those things have to be perfect. Every time few people are able to stay on top of all the complex grammar and punctuation rules that a sub n is a typically tries to stay focused on. There's always a balance between perfecting something and getting it out in a timely fashion. But you do need to be proficient enough to allow your writing to be taken seriously. For instance, you don't want to confuse their T-H-E-I-R with T H E R E, or T H E R E. The different forms of saying there. And of course, you don't want to spell things completely wrong, especially when an automatic spellcheck these days is capable of catching most words. It looks lazy otherwise, what I do recommend is reading through your copy several times, once it's finished, paying special attention to this presentation layer and fixing up any mistakes that you see each time you do so, you'll find your catch subtler and subtler errors. And it can be really eye-opening when you do this for the first time, you may well find that your copy is littered with mistakes that you are unable to notice while you are reading with an eye on the meaning of your words rather than on the formal or formatting aspects. Next question, are there any typos in the text? You may notice that there may be some other types of mistakes in your texts like and Erin comma, one that was accidentally left behind after you deleted the word earlier or something like that. Or a bracket accidentally missing from a parenthetical phrase or a quote that you forgot to close or that you closed in the wrong place, or a set of bullet points where you've been inconsistent with the use of full stops or lack of full stops at the end. Next, your headlines square up. This is another question you could ask. You may notice, for instance, that some headlines, headings are inconsistently written, say in a different size or in different font from the others, or that your headings and subheadings don't always match up in terms of their style or format. In some way. All these things I've mentioned in this lesson may seem like nothing to you, but readers do spot these sorts of mistakes sometimes. And they create, at best a distraction and at worst, a feeling that the author is lazy or lacks credibility. A text that is really tight, that avoids grievous mistakes in the area of presentation will punch a whole lot harder. And being so meticulously edited, it will likely be trusted more and therefore probably shared more widely than otherwise by people who are sensitive to these things. That's why newspapers and magazines tend to go to great lengths to check spelling, grammar, and punctuation and to ensure consistency throughout the text, to eliminate typos and so forth. It really matters to them. And it should matter to you. If you miss the lesson on presentational elegance in the secret source section, I recommend you go back and watch it to help improve the presentation dimension of your writing even further. But that brings us to the end of our discussion of the four dimensions of exquisite prose. I hope it's been helpful having this perspective as well to add to the other one that I gave you, namely the four ingredients of great writing perspective. Before we go on though, I want to give you a chance to practice working with some of the questions I outlined here. I want to share with you what I call my quick smart editing system. Now, although this system doesn't go through one dimension at a time, as I've done in the lesson so far, I've merged a number of questions, the questions I have already told you about together to create a rapid editing system that you can use to quickly but thoroughly edit any piece of nonfiction writing that you find yourself working with. So are you ready to learn the quick, smart editing system? If so, I'll see you in the next lesson. 38. PROJECT: My quick-smart editing system: So far in this section, we've seen that your writing may be divided up in several different ways, each of which gives you a different kind of leverage over its overall quality. We saw how you can view your writing in terms of ingredients and also in terms of dimensions. And we saw that each of these perspectives that allows you to make finer and finer refinements to anything you've written, whether it's a business email, an official report of some kind, or a piece of content marketing. Now, any type of nonfiction writing really can be improved by applying these two different frameworks. Now, with everything I've taught you, I'm confident that you should be able to go ahead and make remarkable improvements to your copywriting or copy editing. In this chapter, however, I'm going to show you a helpful editing technique that will give you the opportunity to put into practice much of what you've learned so far throughout the course. Now to follow along with this quick editing process, I recommend having an unedited piece of nonfiction writing handy to work with. Ideally, it should be an article or a blog post, though it could be something different like a piece of website copy or the executive summary of a report, say 500 to a thousand words of text, either by you or someone else. But it shouldn't be in too good a shape. Don't use an article from the Wall Street Journal, for instance, because it would likely be so good that they had hired to be any scope for improving it. It should be something at least that could do with improving, but at the same time, not so bad that you can't understand it at all because that would also make editing it impossible. Now, something in-between those two extremes is probably ideal. So I'll let you get ready with your document and then we can start editing. Okay, so if you've got your document ready, I'm now going to run through the steps of this very smart editing system that I've created for your benefit. Now I don't want you to think that you always need to go through these steps sequentially. Later as your experience grows, you'll probably find yourself doing these steps simultaneously as I do myself. What's more sometimes the document you are editing may be in good enough shape already. Good enough that some of the steps we're actually even be necessary. I'm breaking things down here in a step-by-step way just so that you can understand the entire process. Because once you know it, you're going to have just so much control over your writing. Now, what I recommend you do here is listened to me talk about each step first, and then pause the video and carry out that particular step in the copy that you've got prepared. Sound good. Okay. Then Let's begin. Step one. Give the document a quick read through. Start by just giving the document you are editing a cursory read-through, provided it's not too long, just read the entire thing, the whole way through in a casual, not too intense way. The idea here is to get you familiar with the subject matter and with what the writing is geared towards achieving? Get to know the scope and boundaries of the piece. And also the quality of writing that you're dealing with. It's much easier to edit something once you know exactly what it's about, where it's going and how good it is. As I said, just read through the document in a cursory, not too detailed way. After you've done that, go to step to step to explicitly define your intention and audience. The next step is to explicitly define the primary intention and the specific audience for the piece of work that you're editing. Earlier in the course, we looked at the various intentions you might have such as to inform, persuade, entertain, motivate, educate, or transform. Well, this is the time to write that intention down. Also include specific details of the audience you're targeting with the writing. So if, for example, you might write down the intention of the sales copy is to persuade fitness fanatics worldwide to buy my new health drink. Or the intention of Risks Report is to persuade policymakers to change the country's euthanasia laws. Or the intention of this blog post is to inform the general public of the dangers of eating red meat. Also note down any secondary intentions that are worth mentioning. For example, the intention of this blog post is to inform the general public of the dangers of eating red meat and to do so inspiring and entertaining way. And then you're ready to go to the next step. Step three, physically separate the points. The next step is to break the points up into stand-alone paragraphs. Now this is largely a technical steps, so it's an easy one to basically, I want you to break the text up in your document into separate points, one after the other. You should end up with each sentence physically separated from the previous one, so that each sentence is effectively its own paragraph. When all the sentences are separated from each other physically, it's easier to assess each point more objectively. And that's the real point of this particular part of the exercise. Now, you may notice some sentences that contain two or more points within them. In that case, you're welcome to turn each point into its own sentence, physically separate from the rest as well. At this stage, you don't have to change the order or wording or any of the points. Just separate them so that you can begin evaluating each sentence in isolation later. When you've done that separate rule, the points from each other. Let's go on to the next step for make sure each point makes sense. Now look at each of these standalone sentences that you've created one-by-one with the sole objective of determining whether each one makes complete sense to you. If any point is unclear, decide to seek clarification from the author if you can. But for now, for the purpose of this exercise, you can try to guess the point that you think is being made and write it in a way that makes perfect sense to you. You can make a reasoned assumption which you can decide later to get the author to check. If you're totally unable to stand up a point after checking it or thinking about it, it's probably best to delete it. Because if a point doesn't make sense to you, there's a good chance it won't make sense to your readers either. The exception is where the text requires a particular kind of specialist knowledge to understand at all. In which case, it may be best that you choose something else to edit. Once you've ensured every point makes sense to you, you may go on to the next step. Step five, make sure each point is relevant to your purpose. Now go through each point again one at a time. But this time, delete anything you may feel or you feel may not be vital to the narrative. In other words, look for points that you think maybe don't help to fulfill the needs of the narrative, the overall purpose of the piece that you noted down earlier. For example, if your purpose is to inform people of the dangers of eating red meat in an entertaining and inspiring way. You now look for any points that are irrelevant or not particularly useful to fulfilling that purpose. And you will delete them afterwards. You'd be left with only unambiguously relevant and worthwhile points that all make sense. Step six, make sure each point is unique. Next, we want to go through each point that's left and make sure it isn't repeated anywhere else within the narrative. That is, we want to ensure each point in the narrative is unique. For example, at 1 you might have that says, eating red meat has many dangerous consequences. And further down, you might find you have the writer also, as I said, there are many risks associated with eating red meat. Now, unless you have a very good reason for keeping both of those sentences in the text, say for the sake of reinforcement or for drama, for poetry, you may want to delete one of them. Now take care. There might be a case where two points sound similar, but they have a slightly different emphasis. For example, many of the risks associated with eating red meat are well-known. Now that's slightly different from saying there are many risks associated with eating red meat, right? It may be worth keeping both of those for now, at least. Step seven, ensure all the facts and details are correct. It's a good idea now to make sure that the content is all accurate. Just go through each point and assess whether all the facts seem to be correct. If anything appears doubtful to, you may wanna do some more research on it to confirm its accuracy. Or else you may decide to double-check anything you're not sure about with the original writer of the piece at this stage. It's also worth confirming things like the genders of any people mentioned in the text if known to prevent you wrongly assigning words like miss, mister or anything else, People's job titles, if any, I mentioned in the piece the spelling and titles of any organizations that are referred to. Anything else related to the content. After you've checked these things and if necessary, fixed up any points, you're ready to move on to the next step. Step eight, consider whether anything is missing. I want you to think back to your purpose and consider now whether there may be anything worth adding that might help you to fulfill your stated purpose. You want to consider whether, for instance, any new details or examples could be offered that may help better achieve that purpose. After you've considered whether anything is missing from the piece that could usefully be added. Once you've gone ahead and added it, you can go on to the next step. Step nine, create your narrative sections. By now. You should have a narrative composed of totally comprehensible, relevant, useful, and unique points. In other words, you are in a much better place than at the start of the edit. Agreed? Well now it's time to begin arranging the points into an elegant narrative. And to do this, I went to look at each of the clear, relevant, and unique points that you now have before you. And I want you to begin giving each point a section heading. That's right. Just tag each point with the proposed section heading and then give the same heading to any other points that seem to fall within the same category as that point. For example, suppose the piece you're editing is an article about rising homelessness in California. One of the points you have there may seem to fall into a broader category, such as evidence of rising homelessness. Another May fit into a broad categories such as rising homelessness in other US states. Another May fall into the category of anecdote of a person or people recently made homeless. Another point might fall into the category. Causes of rising homelessness in California. Another category might be what the state is doing to combat rising homelessness. Now, if you've done this well, you will have found several points that fall into the same category and don't be surprised if you find that your category definitions change as you go along. That's normal thing. As you begin to understand the material better and better, just keep going with the tagging of points until you're satisfied that you've created several clear and meaningful categories throughout the document, including a category if needed, for any miscellaneous points. You can integrate later. Step ten, make the sections flow well, now hopefully you're done tagging all of the points with specific section headings. And if so, you're ready to begin making the different sections or blocks of your narrative flow well together. First off, make a separate list of all the unique section headings that have appeared in your tags. In other words, list your categories out so that you can see them all in one place. Ideally at the top of the document. Then I want you to look at how those sections could best be ordered to create the most logical flow from one category to another. For example, here are the five categories I created earlier place now in a reasonably elegant order. Topic, rising homelessness in California. Evidence of rising homelessness. Anecdote of person recently made homeless, causes of rising homelessness in California. What's being done to combat rising homelessness in California, rising homelessness in other US states, etc. Now, you may notice that some of your sections are more closely related to each other than others, or that they flowed better into each other. So you may want to move those related sections nearer to each other on the list to get the best possible arrangement or flow. The idea is to end up with a neatly ordered list of sections that precede both logically and elegantly inline with your purpose. Step 11, the points into their sections. Now that you've sections are better ordered, you're ready to move the points into their relevant categories. Now I want you to just physically move the points you previously tagged into their designated sections. You can remove the tags from the points themselves as you do so so that it looks less messy. Keep the category headings in place so that you can continue to have an overview of the structure for now. You should now find that the narrative is a lot tinier. The points are no longer a random list of ideas, but a neatly placed within elegantly flowing categories. Step 12, order the points elegantly within their sections. You're now ready to begin a more refined edit of the points within each section. Move the various points around within their respective sections to create the most orderly and elegant arrangement of those points to. You could start by deciding which point in each section to begin with and to end with for that particular section. And then decide where the remaining points should go within that same section. What you're doing here is building elegance into the movement of points within sections, as well as between the sections themselves. Step 13, apply the secret sauce. Now it's time to begin tying those well-ordered points together to read in the best way possible. And you can do so using the simplicity, clarity, elegance, evocativeness framework that I gave you at the start of the course. In other words, you now want to make sure the piece is written in the most simple, clear, elegant, and evocative way possible. It's great if you can remember all of the tactics I showed you. But it doesn't matter if you can't. For now, just apply what you remember to the best of your own ability. Just aim to balance the four ingredients to your own liking and to make the script read as best as it can based on whatever you remember. You could look at, for instance, tightening your sentences to make them snappier. Making the language more plain and punchy, making the ideas crisp, sharp and bright, making the writing more rhythmic and musical, and making the prose more stimulating. For instance, if possible, by creating a bit more color or bit more drama. If you haven't already done so, you may now remove the category headings, the tags too. If it's helpful, you can replace them with new sentences that tie the sections together nicely. We'll make the transitions between them smooth. These narrative turns can sometimes give a better definition to your narrative, but just be aware that it won't always be necessary or possible to create narrative turns in this way. Step 14, check spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Finally, let's take some time to tidy up the presentation of the writing and use this opportunity to ensure that things like the headings and the full venting all look good and consistent. Check the spelling and punctuation, clean up any typos, and then step back. It's a good time to sit there and marvel at what you've just created. I expect, and hope that what you have before you now is a piece of writing that is much more comprehensible and a great deal more compelling and indeed beautiful than the document you started out with. And if it is, you can give yourself a big pat on the back. I'll see you in the next chapter for a summary and some final words. 39. A glance in the rearview mirror: So first of all, I just want to say thank you for sharing this journey with me. I hope you've gained a lot of new insights from this course that will help to empower your writing and of course, you're editing going forward. Before I wrap up, I wanted to just quickly summarize the ideas and the perspectives that I've shared with you here one last time. To really help solidify the learning. We kicked off the course by looking at the mindset of exceptional writers. And I mentioned a few things that you should keep at the front of your own mind whenever writing anything. In the mindset section, I first said that before. Anything else you need to ask yourself whether or not you truly have something worth saying, because if you don't, then you'll only be wasting your time trying to dress up your writing with all the techniques that I've given you. So make sure you really do have something worth saying before anything else. After that, I said that it helps when you can clearly, explicitly and articulately define your purpose whenever writing something. Then I said that identifying this so-called purpose basically meant being clear yourself on two very specific things, your intention and your audience. I said it helps to write down those two aspects of your purpose even before beginning to write your piece, because doing this will help you to shape your content and also to get the best tone and the right pace to match your purpose. After that, I went on to explain to you the five aspirations of pretty much all elite writers. And that is, they strive to ensure that their writing is comprehensible, beautiful, effective, engaging, and authentic. And I suggested that those five aspirations provided you with the best foundation for sweeping readers off their feet and wowing them with your prose. Next, we learned that there were two keys to effective written communication that will worth keeping in mind the content of the piece on the one hand and the tone of the piece on the other. And I showed you that you can make your writing more impactful just by skillfully manipulating those two elements. After that, I introduced you to further aspects of an elite writers mindsets such as the tendency to pay obsessive attention to detail in order to maximize the power and beauty of a piece of writing. Also important is developing the ability to break down 1's content into various functional types, a skill that helps you to organize your prose meticulously. After we completed the mindset section, I went on to explain that I teach you two powerful writing frameworks. And I argued that those crisscrossing perspectives would give you a great deal more power over the quality of your writing. Now the first of those perspectives I called the secret sauce of exceptional writing, otherwise known as the four ingredients of good writing. And this remember was the magic formula for producing beautiful writing, namely simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. These design principles, I showed you several ways to optimize each of those ingredients and also told you that you needed to learn to blend and balance, simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness every time for the best results. You learn those four ingredients were again, the fundamental design principles of stylish writing. Simplicity I explained makes your writing ping. Clarity, makes it ring. Elegance, makes it sing, and evocativeness makes it zing. After showing you how to apply the four ingredients to your writing, I went on to teach you the second powerful writing perspective, which I named the four dimensions of exquisite pros. And I said that this was a framework that I use mostly to edit my own and other people's writing. The four dimensions I pointed out were content, structure, style, and presentation. Now it helps to think of these four dimensions when writing because it lets you ask a bunch of important questions that enable you to bring the quality of your writing up even more. After showing you what those questions were for each dimension, I shared with you my quick smart editing system, which was a step-by-step process enabling you to address a range of problems that can negatively impact the quality of a piece of writing process. It also allowed you to practice everything else that you'd learned in the course. And that's how we got to where we are now. We're hopefully I've helped to turn you into a budding, elite writer, ready to wow the world with your amazing new content. Now I just wanted you to know again, what I've done in this course is bring together the content of some of my premium writing courses in a way that takes you up the learning curve of exceptional writing super-fast. And that's why I've called it a crash course in writing. Well, using these two crisscrossing perspectives from now on to evaluate your writing and to fix any problem that arises within it. I think you'll find that it works pretty well. Now that we've come to the end of our journey, I want you to take a step back and a deep breath. Recognize the tremendous value of what you've learned, tricks, tools, tactics, and techniques that will put you way ahead of other aspiring writers. I also want you to congratulate yourself for making it this far with these powerful perspectives in your writing arsenal, I've no doubt that you're writing real quickly. Begin to stand out both in your workplace and if you want in the wilds of the Internet, I urge you to keep practicing these writing and editing techniques over and over again. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you some ways that you can do that. So you're always evolving your skills day by day. 40. The journey onward: So now you know the mindset of elite writers and also to powerful crisscrossing frameworks that will take your writing skills to the next level. Still, many of you might be wondering, well, I know all this in theory and I followed along with examples and exercises pretty well. And I think I did. Okay, but how do I go on to develop and evolve my skills using these concepts and frameworks and formulas that were provided so that I can become a great writer really quickly. Well, in this lesson I'm going to give you some helpful ideas for doing this. And the first thing I'll advise is to keep these two writing frameworks in mind as often as possible, especially in the early period of your practice. That is, regularly recall the four ingredients and always aim to make your writing as simple, clear, elegant, and evocative as possible. Use this framework to guide your writing and to spot and fix mistakes regularly apply as well the four dimensions of exquisite pros framework, which means making sure you pay sufficient attention to the content structure, style, and presentation dimensions of your prose every time you write or edit. My first bit of advice is keep bringing these perspectives or frameworks to the front of your mind as often as you can. Whenever you're writing or planning to write something. If you do this, you'll find that you're writing cannot bet help keep going, keep on getting better and better, even if you aren't fulfilling the highest requirements of each framework at the beginning. In any case, I don't want you to worry too much about your writing being perfect all the time because it never can be perfect. But the more you practice applying these frameworks, the bedroom better, your writing will naturally become, it'll become more and more excellent Hopefully, because you'd be looking in the right places rather than stumbling around blindly trying to fix things. Now if you want to practice these particular frameworks, specifically, I'd also encourage you, if you like, to try out some of my other writing courses where I do delve more deeply into each framework and where there are often different examples to practice with. So if that's something you wanna do, You can. The courses respectively are called writing with flair, which covers the four ingredients and gives you loads more tactics. Ninja writing, which dives a bit deeper into some of the ideas, editing mastery, where I take you through the four dimensions with a live document that you can edit alongside me and punctuation mastery, where I show you some ways to improve the punctuation layer of your writing, also using some of the four ingredients. Now, my second piece of advice for developing your writing skills is simple. It's basically to write. More often. Practice writing all sorts of stuff from news articles, essays, movie reviews, e-mails, resumes, cover letters, use the mindset advice and the two frameworks together and you begin to see these documents sparkle and shine as your practice deepens. In addition to writing documents, I'd highly recommend also starting a diary or a daily or weekly journal. You can try making this a private thing where you feel free enough to express your deepest thoughts about your day or week in a highly descriptive and passionate way. Whichever approach you take aim to be expressive, don't be dull and turn it into a boring task. Make the journal somehow invigorating for yourself to write, be brutally honest perhaps so. And as I say, passionately descriptive, the practice of journaling will also help you in several other ways. For one thing, it can improve your mental health as writing stuff down about your day we call life, may allow you to get things off your chest and get to grips with issues that are troubling you and to understand your feelings better generally. Secondly, Germany will improve your vocabulary over time because as you struggle repeatedly to find the right words to express yourself precisely and colorfully. You'll hopefully find yourself regularly looking up words in a dictionary or a thesaurus to better express yourself and to nail your, your opinions and feelings down. As you do this, your knowledge of the universe of words out there will grow in leaps and bounds. What's more as you get used to regularly writing down your thoughts and feelings and experiences, your mind will naturally become sharper. And you may find, like I did, that you're able to communicate better in speech as well as in writing. Further, journaling will massively improve your ability to tell stories. Since every day or week, you will effectively be telling a story. And as you know, storytelling is one of the best skills you can have these days in business and life in general. Personally, I used to do journaling regularly at one time in my life, lots and lots of it and I found it helped me in all of those ways. So now my next piece of advice after the recommendation to write a lot is two. That's right. Read a lot. Become an avid consumer written content. Initially, maybe things you love learning about, as long as it's written to a high standard, which you'll know because it will be highly enjoyable and engaging to read. And B, what I like to call an active reader, not a passive one. That is, when you do read, examine the writing through the lens of the four ingredients, ask yourself perhaps whether the writing is good or not, and then see if you can spot why it is or why it isn't. Perhaps it's lacking in simplicity, clarity, elegance and evocativeness. See if you can zoom in and notice things like that and you'll become an expert writer in no time. Also, when reading books, don't just read non-fiction. Look at fiction to classical and new. You'll learn so much from encountering different writing styles and the techniques of great novelists, you'll eventually be able to incorporate into your own prose if you want to. It's really fun to do that. Consider whether you like, say, Oscar Wilde's on eight and witty style or Hemingway is robust and simple approach. There are many, many other styles as well to choose from, but until you experience those style, you won't even know what's possible. Now, I'm sure you've heard many writing instructors tell you to read and write more. But the next thing I'm going to suggest you do is something that's mentioned less often. And it's editing other people's work. That's right. Become a self-styled editor. Ask your friends and family to let you edit their resumes, cover letters or other documents. If they don't trust you enough yet, then just do it for practice. And of course, if you do a great job of it, as eventually you will, by all means, let them use your own edited version. Also edit random stuff on the Internet. And keep looking at writing again through the frameworks that I've taught you in this course. Before long, you really become a master at this. In fact, I can honestly say that I never grew so much as a writer as when I was forced as an editor to improve the content of other people. It gives you a totally different and a more objective view of writing. And that's priceless. As I said, you can easily surf the Internet looking for feeble copy to edit and then have a go at improving it using the tactics and strategies I've shown you here. Articles, company or government websites, academic research, other people's blog posts, job descriptions, LinkedIn profiles. Indeed, the sky's the limit for where you can apply your new learning. And now with that said, let me just say that it's been an absolute pleasure and a privilege sharing what I know about writing with you in this course. If you're interested in learning more about me or my work, you can visit my website shiny Roger.com, where you can also find plenty of free resources that can help you on your journey toward becoming elite writer. As I mentioned, I've also got several courses on Udemy and LinkedIn learning that will give you a deeper look into some of the concepts I've covered here. So either way, I really do hope that I can continue being your guide in developing your writing skills to further and further heights. And with that, let me thank you once again for sharing this journey with me.