Everyone Needs an Editor; or, the Story of My Failure

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From the course by University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

614 ratings

University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

614 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation

Writing well is one of the most important skills you can learn for success in the business world. Knowing how to write well allows you to deliver your ideas with the power they deserve. Good writing also conveys a sense of your professional excellence to the world around you. In this course, you'll master the simple, effective skills that drive all successful business writing. You'll create impactful documents that not only showcase your ideas, but showcase your own professionalism to your audience. The principles you learn in this course enable you to become a great business writer. They also provide the foundation for moving into Graphic Design and Successful Presentation, so that you can unleash your best professional self whenever--and however--you present your ideas in the workplace.

From the lesson

Building Great Business Writing

The first lesson in this module introduces the Effective Communication specialization, the capstone project, and the Business Writing course. You'll meet the writing instructor, Dr. Quentin McAndrew, and her counterparts Dave Underwood and Professor William Kuskin, who teach Graphic Design and Successful Presentation. Dave and William join Quentin to offer insights into how writing, design, and presentation relate to a process of continuous personal branding that we call Effective Communication. In this module, you'll discover the simple principles that inform all great business writing and that serve as the foundation of this course. These lessons set the stage for the deeper exploration and specific techniques that follow, not just in Business Writing, but in Graphic Design and Successful Presentation as well. Let's get started!

Be the Windowpane3:01

Waste No Time2:55

Don't Sound Smart; Be Smart4:25

Own Your Ideas3:46

Everyone Needs an Editor; or, the Story of My Failure5:04

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Quentin McAndrew
Instructor
Department of English, University of Colorado Boulder

I want to talk to you for

a minute about accepting feedback on your writing, even when it hurts.

Writing is a deeply personal exercise.

I mean, that's the point of this whole course, right?

Presenting our best professional selves.

And it could be hard to take a critique of something that we've invested so

much of our person into.

I'm a martial artist, and

I've been fortunate to train with many people who are much better than I am.

One of them is Jadi Tention, one of the best karate fighters in the world.

Jadi has a saying that I find really useful.

Don't ask me to make you better and then tell me not to hurt your feelings.

Let me demonstrate this concept for you.

Here's Jadi helping me get better.

Here's my friend Giff also helping me get better.

Here's my friend Diana.

You can see that I like to block with my face.

And look, this is me about to hit my instructor,

former professional kickboxer and karate world champion, Mark Beyer.

Finally, yes.

No, this happened instead.

So, what do you do with all this feedback?

Curl up in a corner and give up?

Of course not, you accept its value.

You absorb it, and you practice, and you drill.

You accept that you need to put in the work to get better.

And then what happens?

Maybe this.

The point is, all of those people kicking me in the head were helping me get better.

Do I get frustrated sometimes and feel like a failure?

Yeah, of course I do.

But the point is I wouldn't get better without all that feedback,

which brings me to the crux of this video.

Everyone needs an editor.

The other point is that we've all had failures and had to eat humble pie.

When I finished college, I got a job as a researcher at a publishing company.

One day, our editor asked me to write a picture caption.

She was legendary, she had a reputation

as never having passed a single person in their writing test.

And this was the person who had asked me for a picture caption.

So, I got to work.

This editor would bold the text that she changed when she gave you back your work

so you could see immediately what she'd done.

And I got back my picture caption, and only about a third of the text was bolded.

Two-thirds of what I had written had survived on the page,

this was unprecedented.

I began to think that I would be the first person that

passed a writing test with her.

I began to think that maybe I would even surpass her legend as an editor.

My next writing assignment was a little bit longer.

I worked and worked and worked on that.

I was just going to blow her socks off.

This is what it looked like when I got it back.

[LAUGH] That's right, one single the in the middle of the page wasn't bold.

She had changed everything but one word.

I was crushed.

>> Yikes, everyone's got a story like that, and my favorite happened to me.

When I first started off, I was freelancing and I was working for

a company that had developed some large condominiums here in Colorado.

Huge complex of condominiums, grand opening,

we were putting together collateral print pieces for the grand opening.

And the tagline for the condominiums is where good taste is timeless.

Well, that's kind of a problem.

We sent it to the typesetter, we had it put together,

the client signed off on it, I thought it looked great, we sent it to the printer.

And someone at the printer called and said do you really want it to say this?

And the tagline, somehow, had been flip-flopped, and

it said where good times are tasteless.

It almost went to print saying that.

And all it proves is that we were all so

close to the work that nobody caught this one typographic slip-up.

And it only proves that we always need to work with an editor, because we get so

close to our work.

>> There are three sub-points to the idea that everyone needs an editor.

One is that feedback is essential to success, even if it hurts sometimes.

Two is that everyone gets too close to what they're working on.

In Dave's case, outside eyes saved the day.

Three, is that to be a professional of any sort means being willing to take the lumps

from a mentor who is making you better at what you do.

That editor that I started working with,

she didn't think that I was a particularly bad writer.

She just knew that I had a lot to learn, she was helping me get better.

I never did take a writing test, but I did learn so much from her that another job

that I didn't even expect opened up on the publishing side of the business, and

I went that direction with my career.

The point is, in your career, seek out mentors and

editors who will push you to get better.

For really important documents, you should also find someone you trust,

a team member, a boss, or a friend, to give you suggestions.

Then, learn from those suggestions.

Don't just apply them to the document at hand,

apply them to everything that you write from then on.

You should always be working to improve to get better at what you do.

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