Communication & People · Foundation

Writing Clearly

Clear writing is not a matter of taste and it is not politeness. It is the difference between being understood and not. This course teaches the reader-expectation tradition: where a reader looks for the point, which word they will emphasise, what happens when a subject and its verb drift apart, and why an action buried in a noun is hard work to read. It covers the sentence, the paragraph and the whole document, it is honest about where the famous rules came from and which of them survive contact with evidence, and it ends with the step almost no writing course teaches: finding out from a real reader whether any of it worked.

What you'll learn

• Say what a reader is likely to take from a page, and write for that
• Put the point where the reader is looking for it, and know when not to
• Make the character of a sentence its subject and the action its verb
• Use the topic and stress positions to control what a reader takes away
• Cut a document by a third by naming the kind of every cut you make
• Structure a document so that a skimming reader can navigate it
• Test a writing rule against evidence instead of accepting it
• Run a paraphrase test on your own writing and act on what it shows