Creative Writing 12
View the Learning Outcomes here: Creative Writing 12
Online (4 credits)
For many hundreds of years, literature has been one of the most important human art forms. It allows us to give voice to our emotions, create imaginary worlds, express ideas, and escape the confines of material reality. Through creative writing, we can come to better understand ourselves and our world. This course can provide you with a solid grounding in the writing process, from finding inspiration to building a basic story. Then, when you are ready to go beyond the basics, learn more complicated literary techniques to create strange hybrid forms of poetry and prose. By the end of this course, you can better discover your creative thoughts and turn those ideas into fully realized pieces of creative writing.
Creative Writing 12 is a rewarding elective! The course is designed to build your creative writing skills in both fiction and non fiction. Be prepared to write, write, write. Evaluation will be based on assignments, labs, quizzes, a major project, a midterm and a final exam. These are all graded using the six-point scale.
UNIT ONE: Pre-writing Strategies
Learn and practise various strategies to brainstorm and begin writing.
UNIT TWO: Building a Story
In this unit, you will learn about the most important features of a story: its characters, plot, setting, and point of view. You will learn how to develop these aspects individually and how to use them together to create and engaging and expressive narrative.
UNIT THREE: Constructing a Poem
Learn how to begin interpreting poetry and how to use your interpretations to begin writing your own poems. We’ll discuss imagery, personification, simile, and metaphor in depth, and by the end of the unit you should feel comfortable using all of these techniques.
UNIT FOUR: Blurring the Boundaries
Learn how to use sound in both prose and poetry to convey emotions and ideas, and how to interpret the sounds of both forms of writing for the poet’s intentions. You’ll also learn about the hybrid forms of writing, poetic prose and narrative poetry, as well as how to compose pieces of writing in both of these forms.
MIDTERM
UNIT FIVE: Understanding Your Audience
Learn to take the reader’s expectations into account in your writing. We’ll look at different types of writing and the different reader expectations that go along with them, and consider the question of whether or not to confound readers’ expectations. We’ll look at who writers address in their writing, who they exclude, and whether or not this is appropriate. We’ll then begin to look at how to find your own unique voice.
UNIT SIX: Finding Your Voice
Learn how to examine writing for characteristics of style, how to use the imitation of other writers in order to inform and inspire the development of your own style, how to identify your own strengths as a writer, and how to transcend imitation to develop your own unique and highly recognizable individual voice.
UNIT SEVEN: Editing
Learn about the various types of editing, including content editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. You’ll learn how to critically examine the work of other writers in order to learn to apply these same techniques to your own work.
Assessment
- First Assignment (Unit 1 done) – 10%
- Units 2 through 8 Assignments/Labs/Unit 8 Major Project – 70%
- Units 1 through 7 Quizzes – 10%
- Midterm & Final Exam – 10%
Resources: All materials, quizzes and tests are online.