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.