Unlike other courses that focus on the what—for instance, what is an adjective?, what is active voice?--this course limits the specialized vocabulary and instead focuses on the how and why of writing.

In other words, we’ll be examining the effects that our choices have on our writing—for instance, if I did place a comma here, how would that affect the flow of the sentence? For that reason, this course is highly APPLICATION-BASED. As we proceed through each of the three modules, I want you to feel COMPELLED to look at your own writing and examine how you could improve it. Then, once you understand its weak areas, I want you to feel EMPOWERED to strengthen them.

This course is for those wishing to write better, not by memorizing terms and definitions, but by thinking about what they actually want to say and do and experimenting with how they do it.

**Targeted at graduate students--native English speakers and non-native speakers--this course course aims to help you produce writing that is accepted for defense and publication. Among other topics, we'll work on using punctuation to guide the reading, reducing wordiness, writing for understanding, and structuring sentences so that our readers are compelled to keep reading out of genuine interest.