Now that you've had a chance to do the errors and insights assignment, I want to introduce an additional pair of terms that will be helpful to us as we try to improve as writers and advocates: mechanics and strategy. Writing, I tell my students, is about those two things. It's about mechanics, which you might think of as the how of a sentence, paragraph, clause, or phrase, and it is about strategy, which you can think of as the why of a sentence, paragraph, clause, or phrase. Importantly, the two go together. The better your mechanics are as a writer, the more advance will be the strategies you're able to implement. And the more clearly, you can identify your strategy for a particular piece of writing, the easier it will be to figure out the mechanics necessary to implement it. We'll be using these terms throughout the MOOC. They can even help outline how the course is designed to operate. The mechanics, or how of the course, are going to involve a lot of opportunities to do short writing assignments thanks to a bunch of tools created by the Academic Innovation Team at Michigan. The strategy driving these assignments comes from an interesting place, a math professor at the University of Florida named Bruce Edwards. Explaining why it is so important to actually do calculus problems when you're trying to learn calculus, rather than just listen to someone talk through the concepts, Edwards says that learning often starts in your hand, travels up your arm, and only then lands in your brain. I think writing works the same way. I also think there's something magical, and at times transformative, about writing things down on a piece of paper, or if you prefer, typing them out on a computer. James Pennebaker of the University of Texas talks about this a lot in his books and articles on expressive writing, as Sian Beilock, a psychologist who ran the Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago before becoming president of Barnard University in New York. In her 2011 book, Choke, Beilock discusses several studies that show how powerful and often calming writing can be when preparing for high pressure situations. We've included links to pieces by both Pennebaker and Beilock in this week's materials. I encourage you to check them out. Each supports a nice bit of advice the Dominican American writer, Julia Alvarez received from her grandma during a time when Alvarez, who grew up under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo was really struggling, "el papel aguanta todo." Which she translates as, "The paper can hold everything." Fears, regrets, anxieties, ambitions, even trauma. For our purposes, all it needs to hold is a record of your learning and development. But I hope that one of the benefits of this course is that even after it finishes, you treat writing not just as a way to communicate with other people, but also as a way to process and sort through difficult problems. You might even keep in mind an observation made by people as different as the novelist, Don DeLillo, and the Harvard Business professor, Clayton Christensen, who was famous for, among other things, the theory of disruptive innovation. Both have highlighted the way writing can be a form of discovery and problem-solving. Here's how DeLillo put it in an interview with The Paris Review in 1993. "I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them." And here's what Christensen offers in his 2008 book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, which he co-wrote with Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson. "I never know how little I know about a subject until I try to write cogently about it." So take advantage of the time and tools this course gives you to put your thoughts into written words. You'll likely learn a lot, not just about writing, but about other subjects as well, including yourself.