Writing Principles

This course walks through the craft of writing one principle at a time, based on the 50 strategies in Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Each lesson takes a single principle — from sentence construction to word choice to structure — and earns it the hard way: by first knocking down a reasonable but wrong intuition about how writing works, then tracing the principle back to the real editorial and journalistic problems that produced it. Rather than presenting rules to memorize, the course shows why each principle exists and what breaks when it's ignored, using worked examples and sentence-level breakdowns you can apply immediately to your own writing. Built for writers — technical, creative, or otherwise — who want to move past "this sounds better" instinct and toward a working vocabulary for what makes prose clear, and why.