Certain philosophical or scientific topics really need an introduction because few people are exposed to them, they’re not part of our shared experience growing up. 

Essay writing isn’t like that. If you’ve gone to school, or you’re in school, you’ve faced the challenge of writing term papers and essays. You don’t need to be told that this is an important skill to master if you want to be really successful in school. 

And you don’t need to be told that writing skills are important in other areas of our personal and work lives. People who can write well have a lot of advantages over people who can’t write well. 

My interest in writing has many roots and comes from many directions:

Teaching writing. I assigned and graded argumentative essays in my philosophy classes for many years. I had to provide instruction and feedback on essay writing to my students, and that led me to develop some teaching aids for doing this.

Learning how to write. I myself had to learn to write academic essays, up to the point of writing a doctoral dissertation for my PhD, and eventually writing for academic publishers and peer-reviewed academic journals as a professional academic. This wasn’t a natural process for me. As a young student my strength was creative writing, not formal essay writing. So I find it interesting to revisit my own experience as a student of writing, and reflect on how that process developed.

Studying human communication. As a student of rhetoric and persuasive communication, I’ve developed a broader perspective on the nature of human communication in general, which informs how I think about the principles of effective writing in all its forms. 

Relationships between critical reading, writing and thinking. As a critical thinking educator, I’m very interested in reading and writing as cognitive tools that extend and increase the capacities of human thought and reasoning. I’ve come to believe that practice in argumentative writing can improve one’s ability to reason and communicate in any medium. 

The videos in this course explore all of these dimensions of writing. This makes it a more “philosophical” approach to principles of good writing than one normally finds in writing instruction guides, but it makes perfect sense if you think of it as part of a broader program of improving one’s critical thinking and communication skills.