Caitlin Hofmeister: Oh, hello. I was making notes. Hello. I'm Caitlin Hofmeister. Thank you so much for coming to Learn-a-thon. Happy Learn-a-thon. And welcome to the Crash Course writing workshop. 

This Crash Course writing workshop is brought to you by executive — acting executive producer and editorial director Meghan Modafferi and Crash Course script editor Annie Fillenworth. 

I'm Caitlin Hofmeister. I'm the former executive producer of SciShow and now freelance producer and writer. I also have the pleasure this coming semester of teaching post-production and science writing at the University of Idaho. 

And behind the scenes today is the amazing mastermind behind all of Learn-a-thon, Laser Webber. Thank you, Laser, for running everything. 

Um, in just a minute, I'm going to hand the reins of this conversation over to Meghan and Annie. But before I do, I want to give you a sense of what to expect. 

So Meghan and Annie built this workshop based on the frequent questions they get around how a crash course is researched, written, and edited. And so, they're going to walk us through each of those different steps involved in that.

And if you have questions throughout, please add them in the chat and I will ask Meghan and Annie on the side, or Laser will throw them up so they can ask — answer those questions in real time as we go through, or potentially we'll save them for the end if that's a better time for some of them. 

Um, and now all three of us on this chat are on this call are very used to making things for the internet. Um, so of course that means we love love YouTube comments. Um, so in presentations like this it can feel kind of weird because we can't see you.

So we would love you to be really active in the chat. If you are excited about something and if we could see you and we could see you leaning in, wanting to know more about something, we would probably like shift how we're presenting the information.

So if you're having a lean-in moment and you want Meghan or Annie to slow down and talk more about something, let us know in the chat. If you're confused, like if we could be able to see your furrowed brow and be like, "Is that making sense?" 

Let's explain it another way, go ahead and put like a question mark or say, "Could you repeat that in the chat?" Um, both Laser and I will be watching the chat closely throughout this. 

Um, and then, if you're just excited about something, share that. We would love it. Um, and so, as I hand this over to Meghan and Annie now, to introduce themselves, please if you could introduce yourself in the chat, hopefully you're doing that already a bit. Um, share where you're watching from. Share if you've watched any other Learn-a-thon content this month. 

Um, and without further ado, let me introduce you to Meghan and Annie from the Crash Course team. 

Meghan Modafferi: Awesome. Thank you so much, Caitlin. Who are these people? I'll start. 

My name is Meghan Modafferi. I've been at Crash Course for about 3.5 years. And up here on this slide are a few photos that represent moments on my journey before I came to Crash Course. 

So, um, going right to left, because that's an ordinary direction to go in, at the right you'll see a picture of me at Georgetown. That's where I got my masters degree. I studied English with a focus on the environmental humanities. 

Basically, what i focused on was how we tell stories that help us make sense of climate change and how climate change sort of complicates the way we used to tell stories and the way we should tell stories about the future. 

Uh, and when I was in grad school, I was able to make a podcast instead of a thesis. And then later, I got to interview with Hank and talk about my podcast as part of getting this job. So that's a story I always love to tell when I give when I talk to folks who are like trying to move into a different part of their career. I say, just like do your best to make the kind of things that you want to be making. And that was a really really big moment for me, where it panned out and I was so pleased. 

Um, so before that, I was at National Geographic, and I was working on educational programs for teachers who were interested in including more environmental and cultural literacy in all different types of subjects they taught.

And the leftmost photo represents a moment right at the beginning, very early in my career when I was working as a public radio producer for a little show in North Carolina. It was a daily live talk show. And a big part of my job was to research the topic of conversation before the show happened live, and to brief the host about what everything was going to be about. 

And in this particular conversation, we were talking about a new exhibit at our local science museum that was focused in spittlebugs. This bug that you see here in the picture, they like surround themselves with this spit-like casing. And I was telling the host all about the different scientific reasons behind this.

And there was like really this moment I always remember where my boss interrupted me, and she goes, "Wow, you love science." And I was like, "What? I don't. No, I don't." I had never thought about myself as a person who loved science. You know, from a young age, I felt like I was sort of an English social studies type person. And it was a moment, but she was like, "No, listen to the enthusiasm in your voice. You love science." And it was just a moment that really opened my eyes and made me think about how much further science can resonate when it's focused on stories and the excitement of discovery.

And that was a huge influential moment that I think about all the time now, doing what we do here at Crash Course. And now I'll let Annie tell some stories about her journey. 

Annie Fillenworth: Yeah. So hi, I'm Annie Fillenworth. I've been at Complexly for 3 years. Three amazing years. Really made so many great things in that time.

Um, and yeah, my background is in creative writing. Um, I studied creative writing in undergrad at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. I'm based in Philly now. 

Yes, that is City Hall the Eagles won the Super Bowl. Go birds. 

Um, and then I earned my masters at the New School in New York City. Those are some of our illustrious alums for the children and young adult program, like Jenny Han and Danielle Clayton. Had a really amazing experience there. 

And, I graduated into the pandemic, which is, you know, no one's ideal scenario. But i spent that time also like making things that i wanted to see. So I started a podcast with my friend Jill where we talked about movies and TV shows for kids from the 2000s. 

I published my own work and I got my first big girl job as an editor at a small puzzle books company in the suburban Philadelphia area. 

And then I started working at Crash Course. So, I got to sort of use a lot of my different skills and niche interests in this job and I've worked on a bunch of shows under the illustrious guidance of Meghan. 

Caitlin: Awesome. Thank you both. 

Um, so, yeah. I'm going to ask as question from the chat first, but then I would love it if you both could tell us how a Crash Course script gets made.

And for all of you watching at home, thank you for telling me where you're from. Massachusetts girly. Go birds. 

Um, how many people do you think the average Crash Course script goes through before production? We tend to talk about steps and there's pre-production, production, when it's filmed, and post-production.

So, but within each of those steps, there's a lot going on. So if you have any guesses about how many people you think the average Crash Course script touches before it goes to be filmed with the host, go ahead and make your guesses in the chat, and Megan and Annie will teach us that along the way. 

Annie: Awesome. So, I'm going to talk about a little bit about what makes a Crash Course script. 

Um, you know, what exactly is the special sauce of a Crash Course script? And, um, the first thing is that it needs to be accurate.

Anytime you're making educational materials or tools, that's the bottom line is that we have to be as accurate as possible.

So, the Crash Course scripts go through lots of people to make sure that our scripts are as accurate as possible. We use primary sources and peer-reviewed research. We have fact checkers, experts in the field. And we also share our sources for each of the videos in the description to make sure we're as transparent as possible. 

So thats like the main thing, but then also you might know that like we have a Crash Course-y tone, and test comes from trying to be clear, engaging, and inclusive.

So we try to make our videos as accessible as possible and not use too much jargon, you know, define terms when we have them, but make sure it's simple language that feels everyday and conversational and that is engaging in the way a conversation with a friend would be.

We like to learn alongside the viewer rather than simply teach. And our videos also answer the "so what?" So, we talk about a lot in editorial spaces, which is we're learning something, but why does it matter? Why should the viewer care that we're learning this information? And that really guides and propels both the series and each individual script. 

And we also build around narrative. Storytelling is really essential to Crash Course and it helps us remember the things we learn and put them into context with our daily lives. 

So, we'll talk much more about narrative in a second, but um, our next quality is that all our scripts are entirely original. We do not use AI in any of our creative work.

And we make sure everything is crystal clear, not plagiarised. Any script you hear recited by the host has been made by humans which we really pride ourselves in.

And our scripts also treat our audience with honesty, nuance, and care. We want to really imagine that our audience are the complex people that they are and try to showcase stories, and also like hypothetical scenarios, that feel like they represent a wide variety of people. 

And so how does this all start? Once we have a series greenlit, the first step is to sort of envision what the series might look like.

And so that starts with a brainstormed episode list. We often enlist the help of a subject matter expert who can help us figure out what do we want all the episodes to be about? How do we want to convey the information? What are some possible hooks and stories that we could use to express that information?

And so this takes a bit of iteration trying to figure out, you know, how many episodes makes the most sense, what do we want to talk about in each one and sort of a lot of brainstorming happens at this stage.

And after that, we create a syllabus. So if you've ever taken a college class, you know, the first day of class, your professor shows up and hands you a piece of paper that details what the whole course is going to cover. And that's what we use as sort of an internal guide for our videos, and to help our writers script their videos.

So the syllabus is basically a really fleshed out episode list. We have things like the course description, the learning objectives, and then we break down each script topic into subtopics and put in all of the actual concrete information that we want to convey.

So, we'll have things like key terms, but also fun stuff like special segments or also misconceptions we want to make sure that we address or don't fall into. And then that is sort of the framework that the writer uses to create their first draft. 

And so, that takes a lot of research on their part, looking through all the sources that are linked in the syllabus and figuring out how to build a story around that information. 

And so, after that, it goes through many rounds of edits including through me, through Meghan, and eventually after going through a fact checker, and a producer, and the host, it becomes a real actual video. 

Shoutout to Latin American Literature, which is airing now. 

Meghan: Okay, so here's the answer to the question. It does range, but somewhere around 8-10+ people work on every Crash Course script. And that's just the script. You should more than double it once you start to get into the video elements and the animation elements. 

Sometimes we have illustrators, like Native American History, we have illustrators from indigenous cultures and things like that. And then that adds more and more collaborators which is something that is so fun and rewarding for us, and we hope it is for the audience as well.

So, I'm going to show you — i know you can't see this, and I kind of wanted to show it to you this way to emphasise — like it doesn't fit on a slide.

The Crash Course script is so elaborate it doesn't really fit on a slide. But I am going to sort of zoom in for you and show you a high level of our full sort of flowchart of how a Crash Course scripts gets made. 

So, I'm going to zoom in. 

Basically, we start once — yeah, like Annie said — once we decide to make a series,  the first thing we do is we hire a subject matter expert. That's going to take a few months. 

Then we move into a sort of curriculum development phase. So, we're taking several weeks to develop an episode list, like a high-level outline, like she talked about. 

Then, we're talking several more weeks to fill out that outline with sources, with story ideas, etc. If we have a funding partner, of course. There's back and forth during that part. 

Finally, once the syllabus is complete, we move into scripting. And I don't expect you, I'm just sort of taking you through this, just to give you a sense of the scope. 

Obviously, there's not going to be a pop quiz at the end.

But yeah, then we move into a first draft. We have our subject matter expert review every single draft to make sure that we've gotten everything right at a high level. We have multiple edits. 

So first we have likeba developmental edit, which is more focused on story and priorities. You know, sod we spend enough time on one thing and too much time on another thing? Things like that. 

Then we have the lead editor do a second edit. And then things get passed to different types of stakeholders. So, we send the script to our producers, and our producers are really focused on...

Like, I always tell this story that one time, in our Religion series, we had an introduction that was about a small community who experienced what felt to this community at this church like to beva miracle. And it was that there was a painting on their church and it like started dripping oil, and they were like, "This is a miracle, a modern miracle."

And I was like, "Oh, this is such an exciting place to start the script." And the producer was like, "Okay, but what are they going to see on-screen? It's lit. It's a wall. You want people to look at a wall, just a blank wall? It's almost paint drying. That's what you're asking for."

So the producers bring a really different perspective than what we are thinking about on the editorial side, and that's really helpful. 

We also have our host review the scripts and change up little jokes and references to make it more personal to them. 

And then fact check, copy edit. So that's when we go back through to make sure you know just polished everything, make sure we're not being too redundant, make sure everything feels sensitive. 

And then finally we get to the table read, which is a sort of a rehearsal with our host. 

But I will move off of this annoying and difficult-to-look-at figma board, and move back to our deck if I can. Let's see...

Caitlin: Cool. And I feel like now is a great time while you do that, Meghan, looking at all those people on all those stages. 

Um, I just wanna thank... Crash Course is free. Crash Course is free for everyone and is meant to be accessible. And so I want to thank Shannon Alexander and Tia Hazard for donating.

This is part of the reason were doing this for Learn-a-thon is to make sure Crash Course will always be free. So, thank you all for being here and thank you for supporting what these guys do. 

Um, cool. And so — oh, can you still hear me? I just lost one headphone. Um, so moving forward, Annie, you had mentioned that we're going to talk more about narrative. Um, so let's go ahead and talk that.

How do you take this commitment to accuracy, all this research that you're doing, and then turn it into action compelling story that people are going to not only be interested in watching, but also that will help stay in their minds? 

And um. Just before I actually pass it over to you, some questions that came up that are related to that is, do you follow like a certain kind of style guide, and how does that interact with that process?

Annie: Yeah, we have our own style guide that we sort of adhere to, but it's also sort of in flux. We don't necessarily, we're not strictly AP or Chicago or anything like that. 

Also, because the information is imparted verbally, so you can't really see the text anyway, but we don't have a style guide that helps us keep things in order on our end. 

Meghan: Awesome. So yeah, big big picture, something we really think about when we're trying to figure out how to make it all a story. We ask ourselves these three big questions:

What am learning that I didn't know before?

What's making me feel something?

And, 

What's my genuine journey of discovery?

Almost all of the time our writers are not experts on the subject. And so, when we give them these syllabi, they are genuinely reading information, digesting things, synthesising information for the first time, learning a lot of things for the first time. And that means that we get frustrated sometimes. 

We get confused. We're grasping for like analogies and metaphors to try to latch on to something we already know. And then sometimes those fall apart and we have to start again. 

That whole process of learning, it happens to us, and every time we try to write a Crash Course script — and you know when you grow up when you go to school you learn to hide that whole part of the writing process and just document — okay, I've sorted it out, and let me put the clean and finished part on the page.

But what we try to do is really hold on to what were the highs and lows of my journey to understanding this information what were the twists and turns the moments where I fell into a misconception or got confused and how did I sort of resolve that and we try to build a story from that. 

Um, and I think this is like an extremely nerdy thing to say, but I think I can prove it to you. It seems crazy to say that we would take our journey of discovery and make it like a plot, but... I'm going to show you how you can really layer a Crash Course script onto...

This is like a common plot structure. I pulled this from the legendary comedy training centre Upright Citizens Brigade. This like an adapted version of their plot structure for like a TV show pilot, like a comedy TV show pilot. 

But I'm going to show you how a Crash Course script, defining the nerdy concept of what is a species, actually kind of fits into this TV pilot format. 

So, well start with: fun. Open with something fun, interesting, and relatable  

So, this is an example from a real Crash Course script. A sleepy basset hound and a tireless border collie look and act like they're from different planets, but they can gave a weird looking litter of puppies that can make more puppies. That's because they're the same species.

But meanwhile, if you cross a zebra and a horse, you'll get a bundle of joy known as a zorse, which is a hybrid. But sadly, that zorse can't have more zorse babies because horses and zebras are different species. 

So okay, two organisms are considered members of the same species if they can mate and make fertile offspring. 

Okay, but we encounter a frustration right off the bat. Life has been known to break these rules. Like, there are some hybrids that can reproduce.

You might know some of them without knowing you know them. Like if you've ever had plumcot from the grocery store. But there also hybrid animals that can reproduce, including this hybrid lizard species. Uh, and females actually don't even need a male to do so. 

So, that completely breaks the definition of species that I just gave to you. We've hit a snag. We've hit our first conflict in our plot. 

Okay. Well, then the next party of the story structure is having a new plan, a false victory. 

Okay, so because of exceptions like the plumcot and that lizard, other scientists think it's better to define species by their genealogy.

According to this idea, all organisms in the same evolutionary lineage are one species. 

Oops. But that gets complicated for a bunch of reasons, including that there are literally billions of extinct species that are pretty tough to learn about and to link with living ones. 

So, this concept really perfect either. Things escalate. We fall into chaos with our plot when we also consider, okay, here's another way to think about species.

Uh, what if we parse them based on environmental conditions, like how polar bears live in a different type of habitat than grizzly bears?

Well, that's starts to fall apart as soon as you consider any number of species that live in more than one environment.

And at this point, we might want to level with our audience. We say, if all of this feels confusing to you, you're actually on to something. 

In real life, it's really difficult to pin down what makes a species. And every single definition of species that scientists have come up with is imperfect. 

But we still have to resolve it somehow. Uh and ultimately we land on well humans make knowledge by categorising things even if those categories aren't as rock solid as we wish they were. 

So our systems for naming and classifying things are totally imperfect, and at the same time, super super useful. Having working species definitions lets us compare and contrast things, notice what they have in common. 

But it's also really really interesting when those things break and that helps us learn more about the world and about how nature works. 

Caitlin: Awesome. Thanks, Meghan. And if any questions come up feel free to drop them in the chat. 

And yes, you had talked earlier about the different steps and writing, research and writing, and now we're getting to editing, some of the invisible work that goes into this. 

And then we had a question from earlier I just want to highlight that came up from Tass. Thank you, Tass, for asking this. And as you're telling us more about editing, Annie, if you want to tell us, does Crash Course have a plagiarism check, used to make sure that someone's not accidentally plagiarising or maybe one of your writers is plagiarising, and d what is your process for dealing with potential plagiarism and the editing process?

Annie: Yeah, that's a great question.

Towards the end of the editing process, we run through all of our scripts through Grammarly. They have a great plagiarism check function that checks it alongside many many many pages and documents on the internet. 

And fortunately, we have like a lot of people with good integrity on our team. So I don't know if we've ever come across anything that's been remotely close. Sometimes it might be like, this sentence is really close to this sentence, and then it's like a quote. 

So sometimes you might need to like reword a sentence if it just came too close to an original source, but the vast majority of the time there are no problems. 

Especially because of how many edits we go through, it's just so far from the source by then that plagiarism isn't really a concern. But, if there ever were a concern, we would probably address it pretty swiftly. But fortunately, I haven't run into that problem. 

Um, but yeah, we can get started talking about editing.

So, something we thought might be a good idea to talk about today is specifically editing a Crash Course intro. 

Intros ate super important. The first 30 seconds are essential to a video. If you're... you've ever uploaded anything to YouTube, you know about how long it takes for a view to count. And then also it's what helps us get the attention right away, get it engaged, and then move through and set up the rest of the video. 

So yeah, the first 30 seconds are super important. And we're going to talk about some of the common pitfalls that we see when we are editing Crash Course scripts. 

So, the first common issue is when an intro meanders. So you can pull up that intro, Meghan.

So this is an original intro for a script for Crash Course Sex Ed. And the first thing you notice is that it's pretty long for 30 seconds. It's kind of a lot of information.

And it's covering a lot of great stuff in context, but that's not usually what the function of the intro is. We're more trying to grab attention, an intriguing concept, or question. 

And so a lot of this information is stuff that would better suit later on in the script. Even the fun joke we have at the end about how to pronounce LGBTQIA, it's not quite going to hit in an intro.

So we decided to take things in a different direction for our edited version. And so where we came to was talking about our host Shan's first crush. 

So, first crushes are a pretty common experience and we're able to relate to the audience and have them reflect on their own experiences by starting there. 

And also, it's kind of juicy. Like, it's a little bit gossipy. It's got that fun big sister feel that we were really shooting for with our host for Sex Ed. And so, we just sort of connected some bare bones ideas, and then allowed Shan to come in and add her personal experiences.