Primary material from your writing corpus
This course synthesises the following bodies of work you previously supplied or developed.
Writing for Reader Value. Your long reference derived from Larry McEnerney’s reader-value and problem-construction teaching plus your notes. Its main contribution here is the reader → stasis → instability → consequence → response model.
Why Write. Reconstructed from your Nodepad notes. Its main contribution is writing as transformation, external cognition, connection, and a test of understanding rather than passive capture.
Private Thinking Grilling Workflow. The source of the staged inquiry, epistemic categories, stake and preferred-answer checks, opposition and falsification, boundaries, Thinking Document, and Thinking Essay Development.
Content Fence. The current separation of Private Thinking, Thinking Essay Development, Reader Reconstruction, Reader-Response Audit, and Prose Linter. Also the rule that you remain the author.
Reader Reconstruction work. Includes the historical-thinking handoff and later Intended Emphasis Contract discussions.
Complete Wickersham Narrative Craft Course. Collision rather than chronology, story DNA in the lede, observation → curiosity → follow-up → meaning, scene and summary, live-wire backstory, contradiction, pacing, reporting discipline, and image endings.
Aristotle: How to Tell a Story — Modern Writing Reference. Governing action, causal unity, graspable length, probability or necessity, reversal, recognition, character through choice, no external-rescue endings, and narrator restraint.
On Writing Well notebook. Your notes on clutter, simplicity, unity, leads, surplus reporting, voice, taste, cliché, and regular practice.
Paul Graham Essays notebook. Writing as a severe test of ideas, useful essays, the neutral-reader test, simple language, and fast drafting plus substantial editing.
Steven Pinker prose material. Curse of knowledge, reader testing, visual and concrete understanding, and explanation outside narrow expert language.
Cognitive Editor, Unslop, Musings Reviewer. Developmental audit, protected-element editing, atomicity, argument structure, source fidelity, and the smallest-effective-edit principle.
Prior writing conversations. Morning Pages, writing evolution, nut graf, Operator Stack/O9X logs, biography and nonfiction questions, transcript-to-prose, source auditing, AI ghostwriting concerns, and deliberate compression exercises.
The Craft of Science Writing notebook. Your highlights on evaluating story ideas, moving from topic to story, ledes and nut grafs, micro-to-macro narrative, sensory reporting, endings, self-editing, risk communication, statistical scepticism, minimum viable explanation, and close reading as craft apprenticeship.
How Howard Marks Builds a Memo That Thinks. Your analytical study of Marks's memos. Its main contributions here are occasion rather than topic, question-ladder structure, visible logic, claim → mechanism → evidence → implication, confidence calibration, epistemic first person, countercases that refine the thesis, functional repetition, mixed evidence, quotations as participants, and the analytical-memo playbook.
External research added to fill gaps
The course used external sources selectively where your corpus was thinner. Those areas are the cognitive model of composing, deliberate practice, sentence and paragraph flow, reverse outlining, source integration, verification, and nut-graf pedagogy.
Writing cognition and skill development
Linda Flower & John R. Hayes, “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing,” College Composition and Communication, 1981.
Useful for treating planning, text generation, and review as recursive rather than a simple linear sequence.
publicationsncte.org
Ronald T. Kellogg, “Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective,” Journal of Writing Research, 2008.
Useful for knowledge-telling → knowledge-transforming → knowledge-crafting, working-memory demands, cognitive apprenticeship, and deliberate practice.
jowr.org
Reader expectations and paragraph flow
George D. Gopen & Judith A. Swan, “The Science of Scientific Writing,” American Scientist, 1990.
Useful for topic position, stress position, reader expectations, and old and new information.
courses.ems.psu.edu
Duke Graduate School Scientific Writing Resource: cohesion, coherence, and emphasis.
A practical teaching adaptation of old-new flow and sentence emphasis.
sites.duke.edu
Structural revision
Oregon State University Writing Center, “Reverse Outlining.”
Useful for exposing paragraph jobs, focus, and logical organisation after a draft exists.
writingcenter.oregonstate.edu
University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center, “Creating a Reverse Outline.”
Useful for testing whether paragraphs serve the main idea and whether the order creates reader problems.
writing.wisc.edu
Reader contract and nut graf
Jack Hart, “Nut grafs: Getting to the heart of the story,” Nieman Storyboard, 2021.
Useful for treating the nut as context plus the core meaning that unifies a story, and for using a private theme statement to guide selection.
niemanstoryboard.org
Nieman Storyboard’s related nut-graf teaching series.
Useful for the idea that the nut is a flexible reader contract rather than a compulsory single paragraph.
niemanstoryboard.org
Verification and source integrity
Reuters Journalistic Standards and Values.
Useful for accuracy before speed, named and direct sourcing where possible, clear ground rules, cross-checking, fair comment, and actively trying to disprove a story.
reutersagency.com
Harvard Guide to Using Sources: Integrating Sources.
Useful for keeping the writer’s argument visible and making clear where source voice ends and writer analysis begins.
usingsources.fas.harvard.edu
Purdue OWL: Paraphrasing; Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing.
Useful for paraphrasing from understanding, comparing back to the source, attribution, and choosing when exact quotation is actually necessary.
owl.purdue.edu