Quick Overview: Writing With Power
You have reached the gateway for Master of Storytelling, a complete course on all the essential skills of telling a great story in all your writing.
Building on The Golden Rule of Writing, this course offers step-by-step instructions — with core lessons, case studies, videos, quizzes, and supplemental materials — to help you master writing with power.
Each skill is simple and intuitive. You can learn a skill and use it right away. As you accumulate these skills, you will improve your writing.
You probably know many of these skills already. This course helps you to make the techniques explicit and fill the gaps in your knowledge.
In this course, you will learn nine sets of skills, with 75 lessons. Here’s the complete course outline:
Click the Section Tabs to Select Lessons (75 total)
- Overview
- Sentences (11)
- Paragraphs (7)
- Words (12)
- Construction (14)
- Grammar (8)
- Editing (9)
- Style (10)
- Wordplay (4)
• Golden Rule of Writing
• Sentences
• Paragraphs
• Words
• Construction
• Grammar
• Editing
• Details
• Rhythm
• Wordplay
• If You Can Write One Great Sentence, You Can Write Anything
• Follow the Golden Rule for Sentences
• Case Study: The Golden Rule for Sentences and Coverage of National Crises
• How to Write a Left-Branching Sentence, With Two Brief Case Studies
• Move Like a Pendulum, From Short to Long Sentences and Back Again
• Case Study: Ernest Hemingway’s Journalism
• Start Simple, But Also Create Hinge Sentences
• Case Study: Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence
• Give Every Sentence Clear Blasts
• Case Study: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
• The Complete Set of Videos on Sentences
• Who Says There’s No Such Thing as a Paragraph?
• Follow the Golden Rule In Most Paragraphs
• Case Study: James Van Tholen’s ‘Surprised By Death’
• Make Every Paragraph an Idea Bucket
• Case Study: Paragraph Buckets in Journalism
• For Dialogue, Label Each ‘Paracluster’
• Paragraphs: Video Tutorials
• ‘Words, Words, Words’
• Use Simple Words–Especially to Describe Complexity
• Case Study: John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy and In Suspect Terrain
• Use Longer Words as Precision Instruments
• Case Study: The American Sesquipedalian
• Use Active Verbs . . . Even to Describe Passivity
• Case Studies: Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov
• Use ‘To Be’ and ‘To Have’ … Rarely
• Use Metaphors and Similes to Orient and Disorient the Reader
• Avoid Adjectives and Adverbs, Almost Always
• Give Cliches the Ol’ Heave-Ho
• Engage in Wordplay to Engage Your Readers
• To Construct a Great Piece, Get the Design Right
• Create a Journey in Every Piece
• Case Study: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
• Find the Right Shape for Your Piece
• Case Study: The Shapes of the Bill Clinton Story
• Slot Your Paragraphs
• Case Study: Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘The Terrazzo Jungle’
• Find the ONE Idea For What You’re Writing
• Case Study: Charles Euchner’s Nobody Turn Me Around
• Move Back and Forth, Like a Pendulum, Between Scenes and Summaries
• Make Transitions Lightly
• Case Study: Virginia Woolf’s ‘Ellen Terry’
• Remember that Good is Great
• The Complete Set of Videos on Construction
• The Best Rule for Mastering Grammar: Keep It Simple
• Is Grammar Universal?
• Rule 1: Make Sure the Right Things Agree
• Rule 2: Show the Action
• Rule 3: Make Everything Whole
• Use Punctuation to Direct Traffic
• Eugene Schwartz’s Simplified Approach to Word Power and Grammar
• The Complete Set of Videos on Grammar
• ‘All Writing is Editing’: The Need to Cut, Clarify, and Rearrange
• Search and Destroy, From Big to Small
• Fix Problem Paragraphs With Tabloid Headlines
• Whacking Weasel Words
• Murder Your Darlings
• Edit by Reading Aloud and Backwards
• Pick the Right Word, Not Something Close
• Ten Simple Tricks to Improve Writing Mechanics
• The Complete Set of Videos on Editing
• What is Style and How Do you Develop Your Own?
• Two Kinds of Style … And a Middle Ground
• Remember that Good is Great
• To Carry Your Reader Along, Create Rhythm
• Use Beats for Descriptions
• Case Study: Lincoln Evokes Ideas and Emotions With the Cadence of His Speech
• Use Metaphors and Similes to Orient and Disorient the Reader
• The Power of Metaphor: Isabel Wilkerson and the ‘Broken House’ Americans Have Inherited
• Style and the Internet
• Notes on Style
