This course is called Good with Words, but its initial goal is to at least make you better with words. It also has a broader goal. I really hope the materials help you get better at getting better. I hope they help you improve how you improve. You can think of this as essentially learning to increase your rate of return. One way to do that is to take some lessons from the book Peak by the psychologist, Anders Ericsson and the mathematician and science journalist, Robert Pool. Ericsson is often called the "expert on experts," because he has spent decades studying top performers in music, sports, and many other fields. If you ever heard of the 10,000 hour rule, he is the guy whose research led to its popularization. Though he's often said, including in his book, that 10,000 hours is a misleading simplification of his findings. The real key is not how long you practice but how you practice. Here is how he puts the point in Peak. "The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else." The term he uses to describe this right sort of practice is deliberate practice. Here are some of its key elements. "Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established." Fortunately, writing is one of those skills we have already figured out. We are not the first ones to try to get better at it. There are tons of effective training techniques we can learn from and try. A second element of deliberate practice is, "The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers." Again, we got that covered. That's why I'm here, you can think of me as your teacher or coach. Although I certainly encourage you to also use each other as resources, particularly when it comes to getting feedback on your writing as well as ideas about helpful techniques and strategies to try. Now we come to a third and somewhat more difficult element of deliberate practice, but I hope many of you embrace it. "Deliberate practice takes place outside one's comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond their current abilities. Thus it demands near maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable." This is going to be the big question mark for how much you improve during this course and also in the weeks, months, and years that follow. If you're willing to push yourself, if you're willing to travel outside of your comfort zone and consistently give mere maximal effort, you're likely going to improve a lot. But even if you don't have that bandwidth at the moment because you are pressed for time and have other obligations, I hope you do keep in mind Ericsson's idea that just practicing isn't enough. You really want to be intentional, or as he says deliberate, about the steps you are taking and whether there is evidence to support their effectiveness.