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John's unique focus on audience and structure brings a new dimension to writing workshops. John helps nonfiction writers think about their goals and the techniques that can accomplish those goals. With an emphasis on practicality, John can round out a workshop's writing faculty in intriguing ways.
Topics John can cover include:
How to structure a narrative
Identifying your audience and its needs
The anecdotal essay: a dozen stories in 700 words
Why your rough draft should be rougher -- and how to make it so
The hidden cost of your computer's spellchecker
How to actually make money by writing
The rest of this page discusses some of John's more significant experiences in helping people take full advantage of their writing skills. For examples of John's writing workshops, see Talks.
As an adjunct professor at Rocky Mountain College from 1995-2003, John taught a senior-level writing class that became one of the English department's most popular courses. Based on a syllabus he developed, the course combines technologically sophisticated lectures, exercises, and personal feedback to strengthen on-the-job writing skills for students in a variety of disciplines, including business, computers, engineering, and the sciences.
Reprints of John's articles on effective business communication from the Harvard Management Communication Letter are available from the Harvard Business School Press. They include:
The
Ten Most Common Mistakes of Non-Professional Communicators
Eight
Differences between Writing for School and Work
The
Most Common Mistakes of First-time Presenters (as featured in the
Houston Chronicle)
Genres:
Not Just for Supermarket Fiction Shelves
How
to Write Correctly Without Knowing the Rules
How
to Make a Picture Worth a Thousand Words
Five
Quick Ways to Trim Your Writing
How
to Write an Executive Summary. This one was reprinted -- with free
access -- here.
Some of the books John recommends for improving your writing:
Techniques
for Technical Communicators, edited by Barnum and Carliner, is the
comprehensive textbook John used in his college classes.
Visual
Language, by Robert Horn, looks at combining text and graphics.
Writing
for Story, by Jon Franklin, and Follow
the Story, by James B. Stewart, help journalists and essayists apply
narrative structure to works of nonfiction.
John's April, 2002, discussion of that issue was featured on KULR-8 TV.
http://www.johnclaytonbooks.com-- Revised: 3/24/2008
Copyright
© 2008 John Clayton
info@johnclaytonbooks.com