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

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

Contents and Overview

This course has over 80 lectures and 1.5 hours of content. It's designed for you, regardless of your experience level, to develop skills in these areas:

• Planning a project
• Using grammar correctly
• Developing a writing style
• Creating rhythm
• Balancing short and long sentence length and paragraph length
• Speaking with the appropriate tone for the situation
• Being conversational without being colloquial
• Expressing criticism the right way
• Eliminating clichés, unnecessary words and redundancies
• Balancing new words and obsolete ones
• Recognizing differences between commonly confused words
• Developing techniques for technical writing
• Learning useful tools of the writing trade