Writing Self and World

Introduction

In this course, Writing Self and World, we’ll be taking a different approach to writing. You have been working in various other courses to develop your academic writing. But in this course, we are looking at other forms of nonfiction writing: memoir, reportage and the literary essay.

This is a very different discipline from that of academic writing, and at first it may be unfamiliar. But you will pick things up pretty fast! The main thing to remember is that in this approach to writing, you are not bound by academic conventions of referencing and citation. There is more flexibility and freedom to the nonfiction writing we’ll be exploring. But this freedom brings its own challenges.

Summary of content

This is a summary of the content for this semester:

Themes: writing about the self (memoir), writing about the world (reportage), writing self and world (the literary essay).

So we’ll start by exploring our own stories, then we’ll move on to telling stories about the world out there. Finally, we’ll draw these two threads together to explore literary (in other words, non-academic) essays.

Warning!

On this website, you can find notes from each of the classes. Some of these notes will be quite complete and full, others will be a bit more scrappy. This is not a course manual, but it is instead a place to share information, ideas, stray thoughts, summaries, and suggestions in a way that is easily accessible.

Class 19 - Working on our pitches

 Today’s session In today’s session, we’re going to be working on our pitches. Remember that these are going to be submitted for your third mini-assignment. Sharing publications First, I am going to ask everyone to post to the Padlet with a link to the publication they have chosen. Once you have posted, add a comment to your own post on padlet, saying why you chose this publication, and the story you are thinking of pitching.
2024-11-19
2 min read

Class 20 - Thinking About Editing

 Today’s session In today’s session, we’re going to be talking about editing. For the reading, we looked at an editor’s eye view of book proposals. These are different from pitches for nonfiction articles, but the principle underlying the reading is one that you need to bear in mind when you write and edit pitches, as well as when you come to edit your work. The principle is this: you need to think about your audience. Writing is about communicating with an audience, and so getting into the habit of thinking “how will my audience see this?
2024-11-19
4 min read

Class 18 - Writing a Pitch

 Today, we’re talking about pitching
2024-11-17
5 min read

Class 17 - Getting to know the market

 Nonfiction
2024-11-05
3 min read

Class 16 - Starting to Think Like a Writer

 Starting to think about the literary marketplace
2024-11-03
4 min read

Class 15 - How to Structure Creative Nonfiction

 Thinking about Structure
2024-10-27
6 min read