Tips for Better Business Writing vs Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking

The course delivers practical, action-oriented tips structured around a proven business writing framework: planning the message before writing, formatting for easy reading (headers, bullet points, white space), choosing words for clarity and concision, and reducing errors that damage professional credibility. The content reflects Natasha Terk's extensive consulting and workshop experience and is grounded in real workplace communication scenarios rather than academic writing theory. The limitation is depth: as a concise course, topics are introduced at a practical level without the extended analysis that longer writing courses provide.

Natasha Terk is the Managing Director of Write It Well, a business-communication training and consulting firm, and the author of the Write It Well series on business communication. She has delivered training and coaching to organisations across industries and teaches with a direct, professional tone that matches the course's practical focus. Reviewers consistently describe her instruction as clear, credible, and immediately applicable — the hallmarks of an experienced workplace communication trainer rather than an academic writing instructor.

The course is included within a LinkedIn Learning subscription (approximately $40/month or $240/year with frequent promotional pricing; also available through many employer and library partnerships at no direct cost). Within that subscription, a focused professional-writing course from a published expert adds clear value at negligible marginal cost. LinkedIn Learning's free trial also makes it accessible for evaluation before any commitment.

The most consistently cited strength of the course is how immediately applicable the tips are to daily professional communication. The planning framework in particular — clarifying your purpose and your reader's needs before writing — is cited by reviewers as immediately changing how they approach email composition, project update documents, and meeting summaries. The formatting tips on using white space, headers, and bullet points are directly applicable to any professional document format.

The course is a direct adaptation of Harvard Professor James Engell's on-campus "Elements of Rhetoric" (GENED 1082), and reviewers consistently single out the quality and relevance of its material. Across eight modules it moves from rhetorical fundamentals — modes of appeal, tropes, schemes, inductive and deductive reasoning — to close analysis of landmark twentieth-century American speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Chase Smith, Joseph McCarthy, Sarah Brady, and Charlton Heston. A learner on Class Central called it "an excellent short course to develop both your Writing and Speaking Skills, taught the Harvard-way," noting each module is "full of valuable insights." The newest edition adds discussion of persuasive speech on social media and the impact of Generative AI on rhetoric, keeping it current. The honest ceiling: this is explicitly an introductory survey, rated "fairly simple" by Careers360, so advanced writers will find the theoretical depth limited.

Instruction is delivered through video excerpts of James Engell — Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard — drawn from his actual lecture course. Reviewers describe him as an authoritative, clear guide, and the Oratory Club review credits the "esteemed Professor James Engell" and his structured pairing of theory with worked speech analysis. Because the content is repackaged from on-campus lectures rather than purpose-built for online delivery, a minority of learners find the format more lecture-driven than interactive, but the instructor's command of the material is not in dispute.

The course can be audited entirely free, which most reviewers treat as exceptional value for Harvard-grade content; the My Mooc and Coursesity listings emphasize the free audit track. The friction is the $209 Verified Certificate. The Oratory Club review names cost — "having a certificate costs $209" — as the single clearest downside, and several learners question paying that much when the lessons, videos, and assignments are available free in audit mode. Value is therefore strongly positive for auditors and merely fair for those who want the credential, which gates graded assignments and the certificate.

Graded work centers on a 300-600 word op-ed and a five-minute recorded speech, both assessed through peer evaluation rather than instructor grading. Reviewers appreciate that the course forces real output — writing and delivering persuasive pieces — but peer-only feedback is the course's weakest dimension: the depth and reliability of critique depend entirely on which classmates review your work, and there is no expert correction of your rhetoric. This is the most consistent structural limitation noted across MOOC-style reviews of the course.

This is where the course earns its strongest praise. Learners repeatedly report concrete professional payoff. A Harvard Online testimonial states the study of rhetoric "helped me move beyond technical communication to leadership communication." Another learner wrote it "boosted my confidence in public speaking and sharpened my writing skills which has directly supported my growth in the marketing and communication field." A third said it "strengthened my ability to communicate ideas clearly, persuasively, and with strategic intent." The skills — building arguments, spotting logical fallacies, writing op-eds, delivering speeches — transfer directly to workplace and civic communication.