Improving Your Writing

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)

When Can I Use Clip Art?

Writing in Scenarios

 

The Overrated Topic Sentence

First, Kill the Editor

Verbify Your Writing

When to Ignore your Audience

Genres: Not Just for Supermarket Fiction Shelves
 

How to Lie with Formatting

When Jargon Is Your Friend

First, DON'T Write an Outline

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.

Teach an Engineer to Write
 

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.

Once a writer has written something, some ask whether or how to publish it.

John's April, 2002, discussion of that issue was featured on KULR-8 TV.