Becoming a More Effective Writer: Clarity and Organization

Build the habits you need to organize your information better and write more clearly in this four-week online seminar.

This course is for anyone who wants to tell powerful, clearly organized stories — on deadline. Whether you write breaking news alerts, meeting summaries, scientific papers, or business plans, you will come away from this four-week, intensive online course with the tools you need to deliver what your audience wants.

By analyzing your own writing, you will learn how to turn facts and data into compelling stories, write with clarity and power, zero in on potential problems that can lead to fuzzy writing, and identify the pitfalls that keep you from writing concisely.

Over four weeks, you will learn the basics of good organization, various organization strategies, tips for writing more clearly, and tools for staying on track. Specifically, you will learn how to:

Recognize the difference between well-organized and poorly-organized writing

Use the ‘martini glass’ technique as an organizing tool

Use time as an organizing tool

“Box” information to make sense of complex or simple stories

Identify hurdles to good organization

Keep sentences simple

Identify flabby writing, passages that don’t support story focus, and unneeded background

Drive readers forward, not backward

Reduce distraction in your writing

Check your own work.

The Poynter Institute is a global leader in journalism. It is the world’s leading instructor, innovator, convener, and resource for anyone aspiring to engage and inform citizens.

Poynter champions freedom of expression, civil dialogue, and compelling journalism that helps citizens participate in healthy democracies. We prepare journalists worldwide to hold powerful people accountable and promote honest information in the marketplace of ideas.

Poynter is an inspirational place and a practical one, connecting the varied crafts of journalism to its higher mission and purpose. From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.

We bring together Poynter faculty and industry experts to explore the intersection of journalism, technology, and public interest.

From personalized coaching and hands-on seminars to interactive, online courses, Poynter teaching is designed to sharpen your skills, elevate your career, and ignite your imagination. Led by our faculty and the industry’s brightest minds and most accomplished journalists and educators, the Poynter experience connects you with skilled teachers and with other students of the craft.

We teach those who manage, edit, produce, program, report, write, blog, photograph, and design, whether they belong to news organizations or work as independent entrepreneurs. We teach those who teach and students in middle school, high school, and college—the journalists of tomorrow. And we teach members of the public, helping them better understand how journalism is produced and how to tell for themselves whether it’s credible.