Transcript

Crash Course Writing Workshop

From CrashCourse · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 4 min · 10,393 words · 83 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Crash Course Writing Workshop", an episode of CrashCourse published November 17, 2025 (1 h 4 min, about 10,393 words). It mentions 10 people, works and ideas, including Crash Course, Anie, Megan Mafairy, Aunt Crystal, Kaitlin Hoffmeister.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Crash Course, Megan Mafairy, Annie Fillenworth, Kaitlin Hoffmeister
  2. – 20:00: Crash Course, Aunt Crystal
  3. – 30:00: Crash Course
  4. – 40:00: Crash Course
  5. – 50:00: Aunt Crystal, Crash Course, Ellipsu
  6. – 1:00:00: Crash Course
  7. – 1:03:56: Crash Course

Notable quotes from "Crash Course Writing Workshop"

  • I'm Kaitlin Hoffmeister. Thank you so much for coming to learnathon. Happy learnathon. And welcome to the crash course writing workshop. This Crash Course workshop is brought…
    about Crash Course · at
  • Awesome. Thank you so much, Kaitlyn. Who are these people? I'll start. My name is Megan Mafairy. I've been at Crash Course for about 3.5 years. And up here on this slide are a…
    about Megan Mafairy · at
  • Yeah. So, hi, I'm Annie Fillenworth. I've been at Complexity for three years.
    about Annie Fillenworth · at
  • Original. We do not use AI in any of our creative work. and we make sure everything is crystal clear, not plagiarized. any script you hear recited by the host has been made by…
    about Aunt Crystal · at
  • I also just want to shout out Ellipsu.
    about Ellipsu · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Companies & orgs

  • Crash Course — Company · 27 mentions · first at
  • The New School — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Yes, that is City Hall the night the Eagles won the Super Bowl. Go birds. and then I earned my masters at the New School in New York City. Those are some of our illustrious…
  • Fairleigh Dickinson University — Company · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

Oh, hello. I was making notes. Hello. I'm Kaitlin Hoffmeister. Thank you so much for coming to learnathon. Happy learnathon. And welcome to the crash course writing workshop. This Crash Course workshop is brought to you by executive acting executive producer and editorial director Megan Mafairy and Crash Course script editor Annie Fillinworth. I'm Caitlyn Hoffmeister. I'm the former executive producer of Sihow and now a 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 Learnathon, Laser Weber.

Thank you Laser for running everything. [snorts] Um, in just a minute I'm going to hand the reins of this conversation over to Megan and Annie. But before I do, I want to give you a sense of what to expect. So Megan 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 Megan 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 like 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 Megan 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 in the in the chat?" Um, both Laser and I will be watching the chat closely throughout this. Um, and now 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 Megan 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 Learnathon content this month. Um, and without further ado, let me introduce you to Megan and Annie from the Crash Course team.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Kaitlyn. Who are these people? I uh, I'll start. My name is Megan Mafairy. 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 from right to left, uh, because that's an ordinary direction to go in. Uh, at in the right you'll see a picture of me at Georgetown. That's where I got my master's degree. Uh, 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 that we used to tell stories and the way that 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 um where it it panned out and I was I was so pleased. Um, so before that I was at National Geographic, um, and I was working on educational programs for teachers who were interested in, um, including more environmental and cultural literacy in all different types of subjects they taught. And uh the leftmost photo represents a moment uh right at the very beginning, very early in my career when I was working as a public radio producer uh 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 uh before the show happened live and to brief the host about what what everything was going to be about. Um, and in this particular conversation, we were talking about a new exhibit at our local science museum that was focused on um, spittlebugs. This bug that you see here in the picture, uh, they like surround themselves with this spit-like casing. And I was just telling the host all about the different scientific reasons behind this. And uh there was this like really this moment I always remember where um my boss interrupted me and she goes, "Wow, you love science." And I was like, "What? I don't No, I don't. I 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 uh I it was a moment and 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 big influential moment that I I think about all the time now doing what we do here at Crash Course. Uh, and now I'll let Annie tell some stories about her journey.

Yeah. So, hi, I'm Annie Fillenworth. Um, I've been at Complexity for three 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 Fairley Dickson University in New Jersey. I'm based in Philly now. Yes, that is City Hall the night 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 of the writing for children and young adult program like Jenny Han and Danielle Clayton. Um, had a really amazing experience there.

And then, um, I graduated into the pandemic. Um, which is, you know, no one's ideal scenario. Um, but I spent that time also like making things that I wanted to see. So, I um started a podcast with my friend Jill where we talked about um movies and TV shows for kids from the 2000s. I published some of my own work and I got my first big girl job as an editor at a small puzzle books company uh in suburban the suburban Philadelphia area. Um and then I started working at Crash Course. So, I got to sort of use a lot of my different skills and niche interests um in this job and I've worked on a bunch of shows um under the illustrious guidance of Megan.

Awesome. Thank you both. Um so, yeah, if you I'm going to ask I'm going to ask a question for 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 Grow 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.

Awesome. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about what makes a crash course script. Um, you know, what exactly is the special sauce of of a crash course script? And, um, the first thing is that it needs to be accurate. Um, 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 um primary sources and peer-reviewed research. We have fact checkers, experts in the field. Um, and we also share our sources for each of the videos in the description to make sure we're as transparent as possible. Um, so that's like the main thing, but then also you might know that like we have a crown coursey tone and um that 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. Um, but make sure it's like 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. Um, 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 u we're learning this information? And that really guides and propels both the series and each individual script.

Um, and we also build around narrative. Um, 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 um, quality is that all our scripts are entirely original. We do not use AI in any of our creative work. Um, and we make sure everything is crystal clear, not plagiarized. Um any script you hear recited by the host has been um made by humans which we really pride ourselves in. Um 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 um and also like hypothetical scenarios that feel like they represent a wide variety of people. And so how does this all start? Um once we have a series green lit, 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? Um 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 um our for our our videos um and to help our writers uh script their uh 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 um 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. Um, 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 of the uh 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 Megan and eventually after going through a fact checker and a producer and the host it becomes a real actual video. Um shout out to Latin American literature which is airing now. Okay so here's the answer to the question. A it does range, but somewhere around 8 to 10 plus 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 uh you know illustrator like for Native American history, we have illustrators who are from indigenous cultures and things like that. And then that um that adds more and more collaborators which is is something that uh is so fun and and rewarding for us and we hope it is for the audience as well. Um so I'm going to show you I know you can't see this. Uh and I kind of wanted to show it to you this way just to emphasize like it doesn't fit on a slide. The crash course script process is so elaborate it doesn't really fit on a slide. But I am going to sort of um zoom in for you and show you a a high level of our full sort of flowchart of how a crash course script gets made. Um so I'm going to try to zoom in. Um 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 highlevel outline, like she talked about. Then, we're taking 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. Um, 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.

Um 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 uh multiple edits. So first we have like a developmental edit which is more focused on story and priorities. You know, did we spend enough time on one thing and too much time on another thing? Things like that. Then we have the the lead editor do a second edit. Um and then uh things get passed to different types of stakeholders. The script gets passed to different types of stakeholders. So, we send the script to our producers and our producers are really focused on like like I always tell this story that one time um in our religion series, we had an introduction that was about uh a small community who experienced what felt to this community at this church like to be a miracle. And it was that there was a painting on their church and

it it like started dripping oil and they were like, "This is a miracle, a modern miracle." Um, 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 you want people to look at a wall, just a blank a wall. It it's it's as it's almost paint drying. That's what you're asking for." So, the producers bring a really different perspective than what we might be 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 um you know just polish 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. um and move back to our deck if I can. Let's see.

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

Um I just want to thank Crash Course is free. Uh 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 part of the reason we're doing this for Learnathon is to make sure that Crash Course will always be free. So, thank you all for being here and thank you for for supporting what 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, and 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 a compelling story that people are going to not only be interested in watching, but also that will help stay in their minds? And um I just before I actually pass it over to you, uh some questions that came up that

are related to that is do you follow like a certain kind of style guide um and how does that interact with with that process? 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 do have a style guide that helps us keep things in order um on our end.

Awesome. Uh so yeah, big big picture we something we really think about when we're trying to figure out how to make it all a story. Uh we ask ourselves the these three questions. What am I learning that I didn't know before? What's making me feel something? And what's my genuine journey of discovery? Um almost all of the time our writers are not experts on the subject. And so when we give them this these syllabi, they are genuinely reading information, digesting things, synthesizing 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 um 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 I think this is like an extremely nerdy thing to say, but I I think I can prove it to you. um that it it seems crazy to say that we would we take our journey of discovery and make it like a plot, but um I'm going to show you how we you can really layer a crash course script onto this is like a common plot structure. I pulled this from the legendary comedy training center upright Citizens Brigade. This is their um this is 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 um a crash course script defining and the nerdy concept of what is a species actually kind of fits into this TV pilot format. Um so we'll start with fun. Open with something fun, interesting, and relatable. So this is an example from a real crash course script. A sleepy bassad hound and a tireless border collie look and act like they're from different planets, but they can have 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 source can't have more Zorse babies because horses and zebras are different species. So okay, organis 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 a plumcot from the grocery store, but there are also hybrid animals that can reproduce, including this hybrid lizard species. Uh, and females actually don't even need a mate 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 the next part of the story structure is having a a new plan, a false victory. Okay. So, because of exceptions like the plumcot and that lizard, uh, 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 isn't perfect either. And we really 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 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 categorizing things even if those categories aren't as rockolid as we wish they were. Um so our systems for naming and classifying things are totally imperfect and at the same time super super useful. Having working death 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.

Awesome. Thanks Megan. Um and if any questions come up feel free to drop them in the chat. Um, and yes, that we 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. Um, and then we had a question from earlier. I just want to highlight um 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 plagiarizing or maybe one of your writers is is plagiarizing? And what is your process for dealing with potential potential plagiarism and the editing process?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, towards the end of the editing process, we run through all of our scripts uh through Grammarly. They have a great plagiarism check function um that checks it alongside many many many pages and documents on the internet. Um 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. Um, so sometimes you might need to like reward a sentence if it just came too close to an original source, but the vast majority of the time there are no problems. Um, 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, uh, if there ever were a concern, we would probably address it pretty swiftly. Um, 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. Um, intros are super important. The first 30 seconds are essential to a video. If you're uh 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. Um, so yeah, the first 30 seconds are super important.

And we're going to um talk about some of the common pitfalls that we see when we are editing um crash courseware scripts. So, the first common issue is when an intro meanders. Um, so you can pull up that intro, Megan. Um, so this is an original intro for a script for Crash Course Sexed. And the first thing you might notice is that it's pretty long for 30 seconds. It's kind of a lot of information. Um, 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. Um, 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

Sham'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. Um, and so we just sort of connected some barebones ideas and then allowed Shan to come in and add her personal experiences. And that really lightened the tone. it kind of brought us into a very complex idea which is what is sexuality um by talking about something really relatable and easy to understand and um added some punchy questions to get us into the rest of the script.

So the next common issue is burying the lead. So obviously when we're we have an intro we want to start with a punch and this story is super interesting from Native American history. We're talking about a tribe that was arguably very successful and then something happened. They got terminated by the federal government and things really went downhill very quickly for them. Um, so it's a really interesting story, but honestly the most interesting part is the sentence right before Chang's introduction where he says uh at the dawning of the termination era that's exactly what makes them a target. So we thought why don't we move some things around to try to make this um more interesting. So in our final version, we started with that idea, shifted it to the top and said things were looking up for the Monomony tribe of Wisconsin and that's exactly what made them a target.

So immediately we feel a little bit more suspense, a little bit more intrigue just by moving one sentence and then we keep that same context, but now we have a reason to be interested and then just kind of put a bow on it at the end by saying, you know, the Monomony had a safety net, but it was about to break. So, we're able to really build suspense in um the intro just by shifting a few parts around. Um and our Oh, go ahead, Kayla.

Um awesome. Just Nope, you keep going. I will I'll add this one next. I thought I thought there was natural pause. You keep going. Sorry. Right.

No worries. Um and uh our last common issue that we'll talk about today is when there isn't enough feeling. So, intros, part of what makes them grabby is um connecting to human emotion. And so this is from an episode of Crash Course Religions about cults. And it's fun. It's got a great light-hearted tone, a sort of, you know, relatable concept of what do we think of when we think of the word cults. Um, but it's a little bit generic and it could probably pack a little bit more of a punch. So, we decided to shake things up a little bit in our edited version where we sort of put the viewer themselves into a scenario. We said, "Picture this. You're in a cozy room surrounded by people welcoming you with good food and kindness. They're showing interest in your questions, your anxieties, and you hold on a second. Is this a cult? So, it sort of, you know, lulls the viewer into a sense of safety and comfort and then

disrupts that immediately that sort of counterintuition is something we often use in our episodes. Um, and also it tackles that kind of relatable question that a lot of people ask themselves, which is like, would I fall for a cult? It's kind of a an intriguing juicy question. Um, and then we tacked on a bit of a punchier end to that as well by saying, can we really tell the difference between a religion and a cult? So, we sort of tightened things up and made them a little bit more packing a punch. Um, and just heightened it. You know, the original intro was fine and great, but we were able to make it even better. And so, you know, these are just intros, but we apply a lot of these same tactics to the rest of the script as well to make things engaging by adding hypothetical scenarios and jokes and personal reflections from the host. All these things can kind of tie together the whole episode. Um, but the intro is

where that sort of shines right at the start. Awesome. Thanks, Annie. And then a question that came up um that was sort of timely when talking about sexed is from Rachel and Rachel's question is did theme um but I think this was actually about the host because sometimes the subject matter expert and the host are different people. Um but did the host write the intro about their crush or did a writer write it from their perspective? And I feel like that leads in really nicely to this next section about balancing all that information with making it fun and funny. Um, and then just want to add one more question on there because Lucy Lid sort of anticipated this next coming up as well and asked, "Do you have any advice or resources converting complicated educational materials in a conversational tone?" I think you'll kind of answer this one naturally, but just wanted to put those out there as

you're as you're talking about this next one. Yeah, and I can speak to that. Yeah, that sex ed intro. Um, yeah, so Sham was our host. We had a different subject matter expert. Um, but we did um sort of build a framework. Sometimes we'll we'll write a section of a script where we say something like in brackets, you know, TK, which is the sort of journalist uh shortand for to come. Um, uh, host experiences. So I think what we had in our sort of intervening episode uh uh edit of this um intro was you know my first crush name um and then

something etc etc and then uh I think we had sort of added the stuff about being boy obsessed and

boy bands because we had also talked to Shan um before we started scripting about her personality and experiences so we could sort of fill in a little bit of the gaps with what we already knew about her and then she was able provide the specifics later. So, the hosts definitely have um a chance to add their sort of flare to the episodes um as they review them before we ship them.

Yeah. And I would say I think my best advice for making complicated information easy to understand is really um tr what it was like when you first learned it. And that can be really hard if you know it really well. But if you can put yourself back in in that space of learning something fresh and what surprised you, what subverted your expectations, what confused you, then I think that helps. Um, I think oftentimes when we know something really well, we skip a lot of steps in explaining it because they just seem obvious. And if you can like think back to, you know, sitting in that freshman year classroom where something really hooked you for the first time um and and try to or or if you can't like talk to a person who doesn't know about it, I think is really good advice. We often if in some cases if we do have an expert writer, it's all the more important that we don't have an expert editor. We we always want uh lay

someone who's editing the script to be a lay person relative to the script subject matter. Thankfully, that's really easy at Crash Course because we do a crash course on every possible subject and no one can be an expert on every possible subject. But yeah, I would say making sure someone is is genuinely learning it for the first time uh can react to that to your work on it and that helps a lot. Okay, I'm going to click back forward. I had took us back to that um intro when we were talking about that. But this is another big question we get about making things fun and funny. And I'm going to talk a little bit about here about just like how we think about humor here at Crash Course. Um so I'll start with just some like basic principles of humor writing that are true for any type of humor writing. The first is that quantity is the key to quality. the best comedy writers invisibly write dozens and

hundreds and and hundreds of bad jokes, but you only see the best ones. And so sometimes we're really hard on ourselves uh because we're like, man, I wrote five jokes and they're all bad. Um but that's because we're imagining we're not imagining the intense failure rate that real comedians are experiencing and just filtering before it gets to us. Um, related to that, we work hard on our team to make space for there to be a clown mode and an edit mode. And what I mean by that is that we try to create space in clown mode where we don't judge ourselves where we say the bad idea because maybe the bad idea will spark something in someone else that leads to a good idea. And if we never say the bad idea, then we never get to the quantity, which is the key to the quality, right?

like you got to clear out all the bad ideas in order to make space for the good ideas. And um yeah, then later there's edit mode where you are identifying, okay, this one joke out of the 50 options is the best one and you're culling. And these are incredibly self- sustaining. You can only be brave enough to and vulnerable enough to have a clown mode if you know that later there will be the edit mode so your bad ideas won't be showcased. you know these are you really need both uh in order to have like a successful humor team. Um and the other thing I would say is take stock of your toolbox. Um there are all kinds of humor tools. Um humor is very very often formulaic. It's based on repeated and predictable techniques that are going to work again and again in new contexts. Um, and so just to give you some examples, I there are different different types of toolboxes that everybody can have based on your unique

context. Um, so I'll tell you a little bit about the crash course toolbox for humor. One question we ask ourselves if we feel like something is not funny enough is, can we add some physical action? For us, uh, the cra the expectation of the viewer is that the host is going to be sitting at the desk. They're a talking head. So, anytime we can put them in a new space or interacting with the world in a new way, that's going to surprise people and that adds an element of humor. Um, so in this case, in Native American history, we're talking about busting myths about about Native American people. And um rather than just talking about that as a metaphor, we took it real literally and we have him putting the myths into a bottle and then smashing them with a bat. Um, so fun.

Uh, another thing we ask ourselves is would it help to have a character say it? Again, both of these are these are pretty sensitive examples. Um, here's uh this is from the religions series. Uh, and we wanted to think about how can we talk about religious misconceptions which are essentially they're stereotypes about people, sometimes marginalized groups. um how can we talk about those um but not in a way that feels overly preachy or judgmental. And it really helped to add a character. So we had created this character called the devil's advocate. We had him FaceTime John um our host and wear a tracksuit and a headset and just be like the least likable person um so that we could then correct those misconceptions in a more playful way. Another thing uh ties right back to what Annie was talking about with our sexed um intro example earlier, but it's one thing if that if that intro had been focused on um we all have

crushes. That's fine. But uh a good comedy principle is like it's better to have don't talk about a scene somewhere in the future or somewhere in the past. Bring bring it to here. Bring it make it more specific and bring it to here. So we're talking about Devon. We're talking about Shan's crush, Devon. Devon is in the room with us and that really helps a lot. Visuals and sound effects. We love Oh, we love a Christopher Columbus with a single tear down his cheek. We love uh hashtag team Jacob. Little little visual or sound effect moments that can punch up a video. Camera angles and video editing techniques. Here you have Chay making a joke about um the the words that he prefers to refer to himself as.

He likes the word indigenous. He also likes the words handsome and brave. And we get a little bit of a closeup and a side angle to show that he's being a little cheeky. Um cool. I just uh I want to check on the timing. Caitlyn, are we are we having a lot of questions? Should I?

We have um we have about 15 minutes left and we I have a decent list of questions we could go over. Um and but yeah, let's see. Um I think is it is the exercise you want to do about three minutes? Is that right?

Yeah, sure. We could do that exercise. Yeah, I think we could do that. Um maybe we can. Yeah, let's walk us. Yeah, go for it. has a an exercise for us that we can do before we get into more questions.

Yeah. Yeah. So, one really really easy tip for making a joke a little bit better is putting the funny part last. And you may have heard of the rule of three, uh, which is a really good example of putting the funny part last. So, the rule of three is a type of joke where you create a pattern or expectation and then you immediately break it. So the audience thinks they know what's coming and then you immediately break it. So in this case we have I love Christmas. What's not to love? Presents, family, and the crushing realization that the joy of childhood is gone forever, right? It's it's just like a very simple formula that anyone anyone can come up with and you can you can play with again and again. So I did want to do a little chat challenge. Um I'd love to challenge you to write a joke in three minutes using the rule of three.

Um and I'm going to give you a prompt. The prompt is birthday parties. And the way you're going to do this is you're going to just take I will set a timer. Kaitlyn will set a timer for 3 minutes. You're going to make a list of things that pop into your head that go with birthday parties. But and then you're going to have to think of one thing that relates to birthday parties but sparks a really different feeling than the rest. So the format could be like birthday parties are great, normal thing, normal thing, weird thing. And then we'd love to see your answers in the chat. Uh this is clown mode. So we're all brave because one another is brave, right? Uh we're all on a limb together. There is bad ideas are going to are going to get us to good ideas. So I challenge you to be vulnerable with us. Uh and we'll set a timer for three minutes.

All right, timer's going. We are in kind of quiet mode. If you have a piece of paper or your computer in front of you, go ahead and start start writing writing down your ideas. Thank you so much for Aunt Crystal for getting us started with that very quickwitted uh example. And I'll bring us back from this quiet mode gently in about a minute in about two and a half minutes.

Hey, hey hey. All right, I'm going to bring us back. Thank you all so much for dropping these. Megan and Annie, do you want to read a couple that stood out to you and maybe talk about them? These are all I don't feel like there were any duds. You all are so funny.

They're all so good. You're so funny. I I'm The first one I I'm gonna see if I can find it. H candles cake and a candycoated realization that you're hurdling toward death. So good. So, I candycoated realization. So good. I love it. I love it. Annie, did you have a favorite?

Yeah, I I really liked um Jen Marker's birthday parties are great. Cake, friends, and watching people sing to you while you sit silently. So true. So true. So relatable. I also just want to shout out Ellipsu. It's Ellipsu's 18th birthday tomorrow. So, happy birthday. I'm so glad you're spending part of your birthday week with us.

Yes. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. You guys are so brave. Thank you for Thank you for playing with us. It was really really fun to see your jokes. Um I'll just we'll just quickly wrap up and then we'll transition into slidesh into more FAQs. Um we saw this in your joke examples, but other ways to finaness a joke is to think about contrast. Um, so in the I love Christmas joke example, having the presents the be as far as possible away from the joy of childhood being gone forever. If it was like presents, family, and like being a little tired, then that's not that's not as funny because the contrast is too small. I think that I think the person who wrote about candy coded h hurtling toward death intuitively understood that that was a good contrast. Um, another thing is being being more specific. Um, so a specific detail is always funnier than a broad description. That's why I think we've all heard this in different

circumstances. It's always funny to just like give a character a random name. Thanks a lot, Robert. Do we know who Robert is? Doesn't matter. It's just funny because sudden it's more specific. Um, so these are just kind of quick quick um joke improvements. And the last thing I would always say is ask your friends. Humor is social. There's nothing harder than sitting with a page by yourself trying to be funny. There's nothing more depressing. Um, but with people, uh, really really helps and that's that's what we do here on the Crash Course team and here with you today. So, thank you so much.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Um, so yeah, now we're gonna we have about 10 more minutes, little little less. So, we have time to talk about your questions. Some of you have already put some in the chat, which thank you so much. Um, if you have more, feel free to drop them in. And if you have more jokes, feel free to drop them in. Um, so the first one I wanted to start with is from Finara, and you've talked about this a little bit, but I love the specificity of this question too, and thought you um, we could talk about it a little bit more. So, for influential but problematic figures in a topic, for example, Salvador Dolli in art history, how do you decide what to explain about them and what to admit for time or clarity? or what are some other ways potentially that you bring up that topic like you were talking about with um with some other series?

Would Megan or Annie you want to take it? Go for it Annie. Sure. Um yeah and and Megan feel free to add your thoughts too. Um this is something we talk about all of the time um because unfortunately there are a lot of problematic figures that uh we learn about various topics. Um I think part of it has to do with tone. We try not to sort of valorize those people um or overly praise them for their contributions. Sometimes we'll just present it factually. Um and it's really a case- by case basis. Sometimes it feels relevant to say and by the way this person is not great for XYZ reason or you know keep in mind this other thing. Um, and also sometimes it's about really letting them be a footnote and talking about somebody else who um doesn't have as scarred a reputation uh is from a marginalized background or an underrepresented community um because a lot of their contributions tend to not be um highlighted in a lot of curricula.

So sometimes there's room to say um this person in science was a eugenicist. So take everything they say with a grain of salt. But this person over here was doing something really interesting with DNA or something like that where we can sort of highlight news stories from people that we don't know about. Um but also sometimes it's even just a footnote in the description like we're aware that this person is iffy because of XYZ reason a resource to learn more about it. So it really depends on the scenario I think.

Awesome. And then Finn Brener just asked, "Does a host ever make changes to the script on set?" In my experience, I've never had that not happen. Uh but I' which we love our hosts for that. Uh um and but I wondered too if you could talk about maybe some examples and maybe talk more about the um the read through um the table and and that process and how that helps with that. Yeah, we have a lot of structures in place to try to help the host give input a number of times before we're on set because we used to have the host make more changes on set and we're really open to it because that's when a lot of playfulness can come out, but um we've fact checked everything and sometimes things are so so subtle and you lose the word 'the' and suddenly it's not exactly correct anymore. And um so it's hard to like kind of flag those things on the spot.

So, uh, a couple of things we do, like Annie alluded to earlier, one thing we do, um, is when we have a new host, we have like an interview with them where we talk about like what are your embarrassing stories? What's your family like? Do you have pets? What's a weird opinion you have about the world? Um, so we try to get, you know, an understanding of what makes them tick. And then we we write some jokes with them and with that in mind. And with then we leave we also leave a lot of uh placeholders for them. Um, like Annie mentioned, um, then they review the scripts in advance. They fill in the placeholders. We encourage them to react to other parts of the script as well.

So, we often get new suggestions for intros from hosts, new suggestions for um, you know, anecdotes, things like that um, at that stage. And then, yeah, then we do what we call a table read. It's it's a remote table read. We're all around a virtual table, but there's going to be the producer, the script editor, and the host all in a room reading through the scripts. And in those moments, um, we notice when the host, if they stumble repeatedly over a line, then it's probably the line, it's probably not them. Um, so we'll take a moment and we'll revise that line to make it sound more natural for them. Um, also those are moments where sometimes if a joke doesn't quite land in real time, we'll we'll toss the ball around trying to make the joke a little bit funnier. Um, if something or just something feels wrong, um, then we'll make a note to cut it or to rephrase it.

Um then yeah, when we get on set, we can never and we would never want to fully um get rid of host changes on set, but we try to have like one word perfect recording and then one recording with improvisations. So that way if later when we're going through uh we notice that there's a factual discrepancy, we have a take with the word perfect version that we can substitute in for that portion. Thank you. Um, cool. And then we had a couple questions about working with fact checker fact checkers and subject matter experts. So, I'm just going to read a couple of them and and we can have a little bit of a conversation about it.

So, Syjoy asks, "Hi, Syd. Hi, Jacqueline. Is there anything you do in the writing process to make it easier for the fact checker, especially if info is from the subject matter expert and not a primary reference?" what what happens in that situation. And then Sarah J also asked, "How many subject matter experts do you reach out to when fact-checking and developing the script? Does it vary by topic?"

Yeah, I can jump in. Um, yeah, factchecking is is its own animal. Um, but part of what our scripting process is like is is keeping the sources with the claims as long as possible in the script version. So the way that we sort of structure scripts literally from the first draft that the writer does is that the last punctuation of a sentence, we have a comment in our Google doc where they link the source and the the sort of text from that source where that claim came from. And so those comments are all visible to the fact checker when they go in and do their fact check and they're finding independent sources that back those claims up. So, we're able to sort of give them a place of like this is where this idea came from. Um, the fact checker might be able to say, "Hey, that source is actually outdated or there's a newer paper that has more accurate information now or that was debunked a while ago." Um, and so we can sort of

keep track of where the claims came from. Um, and yeah, we always have the subject matter expert that we have sort of developed the series with from day one. Um, but we also might bring in other people who have specific areas of expertise. This happened a lot with um, religions and Native American history. So, when there's particular groups or experiences that we want to make sure that um, we're getting right, but the subject matter expert is more of a generalist. So, that kind of um, yeah, very serious series to series.

Awesome. Thanks, Annie. And I think this might be our last question, but before we move on, I wanted to shout out Brooke in the chat who also mentioned script supervisors. Thank you, Brooke, for asking about that. And then thank you again to all of for all of you for being here. And thank you to those of you who donated to help make sure Crash Course is always free for everyone. Um, and so this is two questions um that I'm grouping together kind of like I did with the fact checker. is um is about visuals. Katie Hoben early on asked, "Could you tell us more about how you think about explanation versus animation in your courses? What type of content is best supported by visual assets?" And then Lucy Lids asked, "When writing the script, do you include visual descriptions as you go or later?"

Yeah, this is these are really good questions. Um when we think about animation we I mean we have to think about it any anybody would from like a sort of budget perspective. Animation is in and illustration is incredibly resource intensive. We have incredible um animators and illustrators here uh on the crash course team. Shout out to them. Um so we do have to look at a script and think about like what are the parts that are the most difficult to understand without a really clear visual. And usually that is either that they're very technical um so we're thinking like the parts of the cell or something like that where you you know you can't keep track of there's what 30 different organels you can't you just can't put that in your head um or very very abstract um so if we're thinking about like uh you know like uh the origin stories of Hinduism or something like that um that are we don't ne that

the average viewer might not necessarily necessarily have um anything to bring up in their imagination when we come up with it. Then we need to put something on screen to mix up make it a little bit more concrete. Or with our political theory series, when we talk about like liberalism or another philosophical concept, we have to kind of take something abstract and make it concrete often with a metaphor or a character or sometimes just like a graphic organizer like a ven diagram or a chart or something like that. That helps us keep track of we're comparing different concepts. We're thinking of this concept falls within this broader concept and helps the viewers make a mental map. The other thing we think about is the availability of B-roll. Um, and oh, I think I think I have to stop talking because we're going to have a nice live stream. But if there's real life, uh, if we can license photographic

or video, um, graphics instead of animation, then that helps a lot. And that it does tend to come after the initial script. um just because there's so much content to get through in the initial script that we have a later pass where we're we're thinking more about visuals and it does end up adding some real significant revisions to the script.

I just wanted to shout out that we have a whole uh stream coming up about animation and editing in Crash Course. So, if you're curious about how that stuff happens, uh you should uh join us on Wednesday. Thank you, Laser Megan. Yeah. So, you don't I just want to flag we are at the half hour when we were scheduled to end. Um, so if you were planning your day around this and you have to be in a meeting, thank you so much for coming. Um, and then any uh Megan, did you get to answer completely? Did you feel?

Yes. Yes. I thought that that Thank you for sharing that laser. I thought that it was like automatically going to roll into the next live stream. So that's that's why I got I did that, but [clears throat] you were getting off yesterday.

Yeah, exactly. I thought you were hooking me with the um with the old cane, but I'm glad to hear that you weren't. And thank you so much everybody. These are amazing questions. It's been really really fun to hang out with you this hour.

Yeah, thank you all. And thank you Megan and Annie for putting this presentation together and all the amazing work you do. Thank you to Laser for organizing all of Learnathon. Thank you to all of you. There's no there is no Complexity without the community that surrounds it. So, this is so special. So, thank you all for being here and don't forget to check out more of what's going on at complex at complexitylearnathathon.com and laser put this in the chat, but you can join at complexity.storepagesathon to keep crash course free forever. And JB, you missed the whole thing. You got to be here for the very end. Um, so I'm so glad you joined and this will be uploaded later. So if you came in late or just want to watch it again, you can watch this later. Um, and I believe it'll be on youtube.com/complexity.

Thank you all for joining us. Thanks Megan and thanks everybody. Y

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Crash Course Writing Workshop"?

In order: 0:00 Crash Course, Megan Mafairy, Annie Fillenworth, Kaitlin Hoffmeister; 10:00 Crash Course, Aunt Crystal; 20:00 Crash Course; 30:00 Crash Course; 40:00 Aunt Crystal, Crash Course, Ellipsu; 50:00 Crash Course; 1:00:00 Crash Course.

What is mentioned in this CrashCourse episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Crash Course, Anie, Megan Mafairy, Aunt Crystal, Kaitlin Hoffmeister, Annie Fillenworth. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Crash Course Writing Workshop"?

The episode runs 1 h 4 min; the transcript is about 10,393 words in 83 timestamped sections.

More from CrashCourse

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.