In this course, professionals at all levels of an organization will learn the best ways to engage an audience they want and need by smartly implementing their important, strategic stories and information and by using proven tools and techniques to enhance an audience’s experiences and interest. Content Strategy is a conversation that provides thought-leadership. It starts a “conversation” with users and stakeholders inside and outside an organization. Conversations are the natural way people think about complex issues. Conversations also enable people to develop “stories,” which lead to understanding and helpful mental pictures. Content Strategy practitioners are at all levels of the best enterprises – in all departments and sectors from the top leader to the newcomer in the ranks. In this complex information age, forward-thinking employees know that if they and their organizations are to thrive, they need to go beyond their job descriptions. They must master the most demanding communications frontier – creating engaging, strategic, honest stories and information that is valued by their most important audiences. In turn that will make their enterprise stand out. Regardless of their area of work, position or expertise, Content Strategy practitioners know how to use words, pictures, video, and social and mobile media to interact with their most important constituents with trustable, actionable information that the audience values and will use. The strategic content they produce enhances the user’s lives and deepens their understanding and engagement with the organization. Guest lecturers in this course include: -- Rachel Davis Mersey, Associate Professor, Medill, Northwestern -- Ed Malthouse, Theodore R. and Annie Laurie Sills Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications, Medill, Northwestern -- Bobby Calder, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing & Director of the Center for Cultural Marketing, Kellogg, Northwestern -- Steven Duke, Associate Professor, Medill, Northwestern -- Janice Castro, Assistant Professor Emerita, Medill, Nothwestern
Using a Story Arc with Content
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來自 Northwestern University 的課程
Content Strategy for Professionals: Engaging Audiences
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從本節課中
Experiences and Voice
Module 3 is all about using content “experiences” to engage the people you want to reach and the fundamentals of creating an editorial voice.
與講師見面
John LavineFounder, Professor and Director, Media Management Center
Candy LeeProfessor
Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications
[MUSIC]
In the first week when we began,
I said that we found that an essential ingredient,
the driver of content strategy, is to understand the importance of the story.
People think in stories, they live in stories, they see the world in stories.
Janice has talked about tone and voice.
Now, the question is, how do you take those and craft it into a story?
>> Whether the work is a business analysis, a novel, or
a long form magazine feature, it usually has a shape like a small hill.
In the beginning, a business report might state the problem being examined,
during which the story begins to gain momentum.
Then there's the middle, the history and analysis section,
during which the story moves smoothly through the chronology, description, or
other structure of the piece.
In the end, the work will gain speed as it approaches a conclusion.
When you are writing a long piece,
finish your first draft before stopping to revise it.
If you stop partway through the piece, you'll often lose your way.
Your pacing will suffer.
You may start to write about details you'll just have to remove later.
You will lose your focus, and sometimes you lose your control of the piece.
The truth is that as you become a more experienced writer and
take on more challenging tasks, you're able to write longer and
more complex reports or stories without a lot of pausing and reorienting.
The great novelist, William Faulkner, said something terrific about this moment,
when a writer stops to tinker and then loses momentum.
He said, when my horse is running good, I don't stop to give them sugar.
You will know better than to stop your story and give it sugar.
Author Ian Banks said about this process,
writing is like everything else, the more you do it the better you get.
Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing.
Accept imperfections, get it finished, and then you can go back.
If you try to polish every sentence along the way,
there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
And after all, you know the job of the opening section.
Depending on the nature of the work, it is to state the problem and
suggest the mode of examination, or to state the question being answered or
the problem to be analyzed.
Don't allow yourself to become bogged down polishing the opening of your project.
If you do, the rest of the project which had probably organized itself in your
head, will begin to unravel.
Every writer, myself included, has had the experience of launching a big piece,
with all the zest and confidence in the world, and
then feeling it begin to go off the rails as distractions hampered our progress,
sometimes you just can't get it back, you have to start over.
One of my mentors who wrote more major stories than
anybody else at the magazine where I worked was so adept at structure and
speed, that he told me sometimes he would just skip the first section entirely.
So that he could speedily get the rest of it down on paper.
He had it in his head.
He needed to capture it on paper.
Now I'm not advising you to do that,
at least not until you're much more experienced than I am.
Get the story, the book, the white paper, report or
study, down in the first draft, before you go back to revise it.
Once you know what it looks like, you can analyze its flaws, polish its gems,
and rewrite at will.
>> So when I write, beyond the wonderful suggestions you just had,
I find that if I read it aloud, that's a powerful tool.
Can you give me some depth as to why it works so well?
>> That's a really good point.
You must read your work aloud.
You will hear what's wrong with it, what's missing, what needs to be cut.
You may not want to do this in a cubicle with 47 other people listening, but
often you can do it there very quietly, or go out in the hallway, or
go outside, or do it in the privacy of your home.
But do it.
You will reap the benefits from the first time you try it.
It's like having a terrific editor.
You can hear the holes in the piece, the false notes,
the rambling that needs to be trimmed.
Why aloud?
Well, somehow you need to get outside the story you've writing in your head.
Your writer's voice needs to be silent so that your editor's voice can listen.
And if you feel a little foolish, picture this.
Generations of successful screenwriters, magazine writers, authors,
poets, reporters, playwrights,
and advertising copywriters have used this technique to very great effect.
It really works.
Revise, the best draft is never the first one.
Almost a hundred years ago, a writer named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
gave writers everywhere some very tough minded advice.
He said whenever you feel a impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine
writing, obey it wholeheartedly, and
then delete it before sending your manuscripts to press.
Murder your darlings.
That phrase,
"murder your darlings", morphed over the years to "kill your darlings".
This is a phrase familiar to generations of professional writers.
Revising, after all, is about brutal honesty.
Those three paragraphs may have taken you half a day to write, and
you may find them absolutely stunning, but they've got to go.
Revising can be painful, so is working out in the gym for three hours every day and
going without food and water.
But that's what Hugh Jackman did to prepare for
the lead role in the musical Les Misérables.
Good work takes hard work.
Stephen King maintains that only brutal cutting and
revising can produce the sound, finished draft you are capable of producing.
As he puts it, kill your darlings, kill your darlings,
even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.
One writer after another has discovered this hard truth.
Lillian Hellman said nothing you write, if you hope to be any good,
will ever come out as your first hoped, at least in the first draft.
Yes, it can be painful and tedious.
No, even the best writers have to revise and revise.
Johann Sebastian Bach said, analysis, reflection,
much writing, ceaseless correction, there is all my secret.
Is there no escape from this tedious side of writing?
Not if you want to write well, and of course, be read.
But, all you have to do is keep working at it.
Ray Bradbury summed up the process rather neatly.
You fail only if you stop writing.
>> And you won't fail, and you will be even better than that because you'll use
all of the powerful tools that Janice has given you, thanks, Janice.
>> Thank you, John.
[MUSIC]
