Before we get into the nitty gritty of organization, I want to spend a few minutes here on revision and how it relates to organization and good writing. Essentially, there is no good writing without good revision. In fact, writing and revision are practically the same thing. We'll cover revisions specifically in the final module of this course when I'll teach you specific techniques you can use to edit your own writing to create a masterful document. In the lessons that follow, you'll begin to learn about things, like starting with your purpose, creating strong topic sentences and the importance of single idea paragraphs. As you learn and practice remember, these are also self-editing tools. Our goal is a highly polished, well structured document. that's not necessarily how we start. You have to revise to get there. You want to continually adjust your writing and strengthen your use of good organization to create a final document that is clean, clear and elegant. The really important thing that you remember, the absolutely vital lesson in this course, is that you don't have to start with a perfectly organized memo. In fact, you probably won't, is that you revise so that your final product has exactly what you need on a page. It's really tight, it's really clear and your reader knows exactly what you want to say. >> Yeah, yeah, revision is important in public speaking as well in exactly that formulation. It's not that you know where you're going the first time. It's that you go there and then in the process of revision, you come back and straighten everything out and that will come forth in my course clearly. That, that waste no time, get to the point but revise the whole thing so that it's smooth. >> In graphic design, again it's uncanny how similar my field is to what you're talking about. In design, revision is a fact of life, we're constantly revising. And as I said before, we're reducing and cooking things down til we get to that, absolutely, the essential message. >> One lesson that I remember that you taught early in my course for me, is that you could just take a single line away from a Panda. And just by reducing the design by that little amount, just makes it sing off the page. It's really extraordinary. >> It's very true and sometimes, oddly, the inverse of that is true, adding one small thing changes everything as well, but it's knowing how to move lightly. And as you say, it's knowing what you're after clarity, brevity, and the message itself. >> And until you've gotten to the end, you can't know what steps get you there really. You can't know if there's something you need to take out. Or something you need actually to put in, a step of explanation or a visual moment that then clarifies the whole thing collectively. >> And part of your revision is how is my audience going to see this? I get so close to it that I no longer see it clearly, but I need to make certain that my audience is seeing what I want them to see.
