Anybody, from the lowliest YouTube commenter to the mightiest blogger in the world, can call themselves a writer nowadays. But how many of us can call ourselves good writers?

Whether you’re looking for a big publishing deal or just trying to sound less like a caveman in your emails, these five presentations should help you on your way to becoming a more effective communicator.

15 Slides, Three Writers, Three Ways — One Hour – Sunday March 13, 9:30AM

This sounds like a neat exercise. The title pretty much says it all: three writers (John Gruber of tech blog Daring Fireball; Michael Lopp, aka Rands, a prolific webcomic author, blolgger, and software engineer; Jim Coudal, President of Coudal Partners Inc.) will each take a crack at the same set of fifteen slides and construct their own individual stories from them. It’s interesting to see what different people make of the same source material, and to get a play-by-play from the authors themselves as they do their thing is a great opportunity to observe the different angles of approach people can take with one premise.

Care and Feeding of Blogs and Book Contracts – Saturday March 12, 3:30PM

Tricia Lawrence of real/brilliant inc. will be leading this panel discussion. For anyone who wants to be a published author someday, this looks like a presentation you don’t want to miss. Tricia, along with a handful of other publishers and executives, will talk about getting a book deal out of your blog–including tips for proper maintenance of your blog, promoting yourself, and where to go when it’s time to start looking into getting published.

With electronic publishing options like iBook gaining prominence, it seems that bloggers are in a unique position to take advantage of new opportunities in the publishing realm. This panel sounds like a great chance to get some tips from industry experts and to do a bit of networking.

Geppetto’s Army: Creating International Incidents with Twitter Bots – Monday March 14, 9:30AM

With the recent revolution in Egypt still in international headlines, and other countries (like Libya) in the throes of similar movements, the description of this presentation struck me as particularly interesting. Greg Marra of Google proposes a scenario where one person–a virtual puppetmaster of sorts–sets up thousands of Twitter accounts, has them live normal, mundane lives for a few months, and then one day they start tweeting about some huge event that’s not actually happening. In today’s world of “report the news now, verify the facts later,” (see: Balloon Boy) such an engineered event could make international headlines before people start to realize it may not be what it seems.

With Egypt’s official news media acting as the dictator Hosni Mubarak’s mouthpiece, the world relied on communication from the people of Egypt–mostly in the form of tweets–to get the real story on what was happening there. This presentation will definitely give those of you in the news industry something to think about.

Tell & Sell Your Story – Saturday March 12, 12:30PM

This panel seems to go hand-in-hand with “Care and Feeding of Blogs and Book Contracts.” While that one seems to be focusing more on the business side of the blog-to-book transition, this one looks like it’ll offer more technical tips on the actual “writing” part of the process; combing over your body of work to find the bits that’ll make for a good book, organizing it all in a cohesive manner, writing a book proposal, and software you can use to help with it all. With a panel consisting of published authors, professors, and screenwriters, you aspiring writers are bound to get some excellent pointers.

Writing Workshop with @BettyDraper: Saying It Short – Friday March 11, 2:00PM

Shakespeare wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Helen Klein Ross writes in this event’s description that “brevity is critical to successful communication.” Even before the internet and all the instant information it offers came to be, this was true–be concise and direct, or you risk losing your audience. As the voice of Mad Men‘s Betty Draper on Twitter (which earned her a Shorty award and national press coverage), Helen certainly has a lot to teach about concise, memorable communication in this solo presentation.  Every kind of writer–from advertising copywriters to novelists and run-of-the-mill bloggers–would be well advised to attend and brush up on their brevity.