Writing Innovation Studio (Spring 2019)

Abstract

The goal of the course is to enable students to become better writers mastering a variety of text-genres - academic as well as commercial.

Description

Writing is an essential craft. Yet few, except professional writers, take the time to develop this skill. Writing clear, concise, and compelling arguments–knowing how to construct and tell a persuasive story–is crucial across industry and the digital world. Well-designed narratives can change the fortunes of a product, community, or company.

This is a practice-based course that will provide students with a set of word crafting tools and an online studio space to explore how to write for the public, industry colleagues, executive management, and academic specialists. Students will gain experience in creative writing techniques and storytelling, along with tools for working with diverse empirical data. They will learn how to transform given research material and ideas into compelling texts in a variety of formats, from press releases and executive summaries, to podcasts and editorial blog posts.

Emphasis is on written communication, but spoken and visual communication skills will also be included. Students will learn how to present and write for both conventional text, and a range of multimedia and digital platforms.

Formal prerequisites

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Identify reliable, trustworthy empirical and scientific data, in contrast to unreliable or non-scientific data
• Summarise the key arguments in an extended academic text
• Apply literary writing skills, such as Point of View shifts and Storytelling approaches, to academic writing
• Demonstrate competent and clear written communication in an extended piece of writing
• Analyse and reflect on the effectiveness of different writing techniques for different written formats
• Apply and reflect upon an innovative writing technique in a chosen written format