I teach current and future leaders to write to embolden action.
One of my Yale employees once said I had a knack for guiding practitioners to write forcefully without chiding them about the process.
In and out of schools, temptation mounts to treat writing as a mystical skill best left to druids and bots. It’s not. I’ve counseled architects, project managers, ethicists, and academics on writing what they see and think in the language they’d use at a picnic.
I’ve taught writing to non-writers who become portfolio managers, public agency decisionmakers, and corporate leaders. in 2011, I started co-teaching a capstone class at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture. I developed writing rubrics and thesis defenses, along with a syllabus, for that course over seven years. Later, I taught first-year students at NYU Stern School of Business and at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. From 2020 to 2023, I coached students across Yale University as news editor for the Yale Center for Business and the Environment.
These days I consult pro bono to local activists across the United States, adaptation experts, and democracy activists.
“- Weekly deliverables
-Evolution from concept to outline to sources to enriched outline to drafts
-Ways to include visual description, conversational language, frame setup, and conflict
-Confidence that readers can thrive on uncertainty, and conviction to reach more focused questions.
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“Your faculty live on the same planet as you, so we know that 20 pages runs longer than most people read or write. It’s this seriousness and clarity, though, that strengthens policy proposals. We’ll workshop how topic sentences, characters and visual images, and conversational asides can sustain a voice through what can become a slog for readers and writers alike.”