LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively

Caption notes

Larry McEnerney distinguishes two tasks for researchers and professionals: writing to develop an idea, and making a text worth reading for its audience. Teachers are assigned to evaluate what students understand; professional readers instead ask how a text changes their understanding of a consequential problem. Comparing grant texts, literature reviews and a history paper, he shows how to organize material around a community’s questions, conflicting claims and reasons to resolve them. Clarity, novelty and detail do not automatically create value, and the order in which a writer discovers an argument may differ from the order in which readers need to encounter it.