One way to grasp the importance of being good with words is to think about a time when not being good with words really hurt you. Maybe you turned in a poorly- written paper or business report. Maybe you didn't get a grant you applied for or you found out an ad and other marketing materials you put together didn't quite connect with customers the way you wanted them to. Maybe you even got passed over for a job. There was an article in the Harvard Business Review a number of years ago on this last point. Here's the headline. I will not hire people who use poor grammar. The author runs two companies and he says, "Look, bad writing is unprofessional, bad writing is distracting, bad writing shows that you don't care enough to learn what good writing is and then you might not be somebody who pays attention to details." So part of this course is designed to help you reduce the errors that may be getting in the way of your academic and professional development. But reducing errors is not the only way to improve. We'll also make sure we increase our insights. I take this idea of errors and insights from the psychologist Gary Klein and his book Seeing What Others Don't. He considers both a necessary part of improvement. "Reducing errors will only get us so far," Klein says. "To really excel we also need to learn how to up our insights. We need to generate and absorb new strategies for approaching whatever it is we want to improve." To help with that, your first assignment will give you the chance to borrow insights from a host of excellent writers. These include the British novelist and essayist, Zadie Smith; the Argentine master of short stories, Jorge Luis Borges; the American judge, Richard Posner; as well as folks like Susan Sontag, Isabel Allende and ZZ Packer. As the MOOC progresses we'll also be returning to Gary Klein and other researchers who study the psychology of decision making because that is what good writing involves: consistently making good decisions. Decisions about words, decisions about structure, and decisions about the different aims of drafting and editing. These four topics are how this specialization will be arranged. We're going to have separate courses on each. There will be one on words, there will be one on structure, there will be one on drafting, and there will be one on editing. We're also going to work on throughout each of these sections one of the most important skills you can develop as a writer: time management. Of all the phrases that you could have associated with your name, here's one you definitely don't want: misses deadlines. So beginning with the errors and insights assignment, let's really start to examine our own habit, both good and bad, when it comes to finishing projects on time. People who can regularly produce high-quality work on schedule add a lot of value in schools and companies and in the wider community. Let's try to be one of those people.