The Effective Communication Specialization
Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation
Writing well is one of the most important skills you can learn for success in the business world. Knowing how to write well allows you to deliver your ideas with the power they deserve. Good writing also conveys a sense of your professional excellence to the world around you. In this course, you'll master the simple, effective skills that drive all successful business writing. You'll create impactful documents that not only showcase your ideas, but showcase your own professionalism to your audience. The principles you learn in this course enable you to become a great business writer. They also provide the foundation for moving into Graphic Design and Successful Presentation, so that you can unleash your best professional self whenever--and however--you present your ideas in the workplace.
Building Great Business Writing
The first lesson in this module introduces the Effective Communication specialization, the capstone project, and the Business Writing course. You'll meet the writing instructor, Dr. Quentin McAndrew, and her counterparts Dave Underwood and Professor William Kuskin, who teach Graphic Design and Successful Presentation. Dave and William join Quentin to offer insights into how writing, design, and presentation relate to a process of continuous personal branding that we call Effective Communication. In this module, you'll discover the simple principles that inform all great business writing and that serve as the foundation of this course. These lessons set the stage for the deeper exploration and specific techniques that follow, not just in Business Writing, but in Graphic Design and Successful Presentation as well. Let's get started!
What's So Great About the Capstone?3:58
What is Good Writing?2:43
Dr. Quentin McAndrew
Department of English, University of Colorado Boulder
All right. >> All right.
>> All right, welcome to effective communication.
I'm Quentin McAndrew and I'm going to be teaching you about business writing.
And I'd like to introduce you to my partners.
William Kuskin, who''ll be teaching you about successful presentation.
And David Underwood, who'll be teaching you about graphic design.
We're so excited about this project.
We came up with this idea and it's really been a journey for
us as educators and thinkers to consider how we're going to
impart our teaching to you in the Coursera format.
>> It is exciting, Quinton.
We're going to do these three separate courses, one's on writing,
one's on design, and one's on public speaking.
But the through line,
through all three courses is on a sense of learning how to communicate yourself.
It's learning how to present yourself in different modes into the world.
And in that, our goal here is a sense of refining who you are.
What makes you a separate individual?
And how you can speak that, proudly, and boldly, and present yourself to the world.
It's been great for us to think this through.
And we're really excited to deliver it to you.
>> You know, when we first talked about this course and we sat down and
we were talking about our individual specialties within the specialization,
we realized that what we teach interlocks.
There's a common thread that runs throughout between writing,
graphic design, and speaking.
And it's the pursuit of excellence across all of these fields
that we feel is so exciting about the course and it's unique.
They aren't typically taught together,
but when you think about it, they're all kind of the same thing.
>> So, as you take the course,
we want you to take in all the separate skills that we're talking about.
But, we also want you to kind of add them up for yourself, and
three main watch words that we've discovered are clarity,
formula, and finally revision.
So as you go through the MOOCs, and you can go through them in any order you want.
You can think about them as you like.
Maybe keep a log, keep a piece of paper on the side.
And just write out where you see things fitting together.
That will help you.
It will enable you to synthesize all the different parts
into a broader sense of communication.
>> And what we've done is we've demystified these particular pursuits and
we've tried to make them as practical as possible so
that you can walk through the process of creation with us.
We're going to give you the formula for success in each one of our disciplines.
But really, the secret sauce is you.
We're talking about developing you as the best possible professional.
It's the work that you put in, and the habits that you develop in this course
that you'll be able to apply to everything.
We've had such a fantastic time working on this course.
It's been transformative for us, and we can't wait for