Module 6
6 Courses
Memoir and Personal Essay: Managing Your Reader Platform: Coursera Institution: Wesleyan University Started: 01/07/2019 Finished: 01/09/2020 Writing in First Person Point of View Platform: Coursera Institution: Wesleyan University Started: 01/07/2019 Finished: 01/09/2020 Writing a Personal Essay Platform: Coursera Institution: Wesleyan University Started: 01/07/2019 Finished: 01/09/2020 Writing Stories About Ourselves Platform: Coursera Institution: Wesleyan University Started: 01/07/2019 Finished: 01/09/2020 Poetry: How to Read a Poem Platform: FutureLearn Institution: University of York Started: 04/07/2019 Finished: High Impact Business Writing Platform: Coursera Institution: University of California, Irvine Started: 31/08/2015 Finished: 04/09/2015
4 Books
The Queen's English: And How to Use It Author: Bernard C. Lamb Publisher: Michael O’Mara Published: 2011 Started: 21/11/2014 Finished: 19/06/2021 How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published Author: Howard Mittelmark & Sandra Newman Publisher: Penguin Published: 2009 Started: 27/04/2020 Finished: 24/05/2021 The Penguin Guide to Punctuation Author: R.L. Trask Publisher: Penguin Published: 1997 Started: 28/04/2021 Finished: 08/06/2021 A Brief History of Diaries: From Pepys to Blogs Author: Alexandra Johnson Publisher: Hesperus Press Published: 2011 Started: 25/02/2015 Finished: 08/03/2015
“As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page.“
Sandra Newman & Howard Mittelmark, How Not To Write A Novel: 200 Mistakes To Avoid At All Costs If You Ever Want To Get Published, 2009:1
“It is a rare writer who didn’t grow up reading compulsively, feeding their minds with great stories and planting the seed for future inspiration to write their own. Reading teaches the writer about good storytelling the way watching an operation teaches a medical student about surgery.“
Karl Iglesias, The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters: Insider Secrets from Hollywood’s Top Writer, 2001:15
Creative writing is concerned with narrative craft, character development, genre tropes and traditions of poetry and poetics. Any form of writing that resides within the bounds of professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of writing is often not considered “creative writing”. Personally, I think the term “creative writing” is just unnecessary and when talking about anything written, we should just call it “writing”.
I studied writing as part of my Bachelor’s degree and I wanted to retain a focus on writing in my MTA Portfolio, hence this module.
I write both fictional and factual. All the written content on this website was written by me (although, a few of the definitions on these module pages I pinched from Wikipedia) and I write just for the pleasure of it.
Writing is key a part of my career design and development so it is something I want to keep honing, so I have continued to write far and wide while building my MTA Portfolio.
I have also read a mammoth number of books, many of them are included in the relevant modules of this MTA Portfolio. However, the only books I have included in this module are the ones that heavily stimulated my imagination and resulted in me further refining my writing style.
One of the areas of writing I never really covered in my Bachelor’s degree was life writing, so I was overjoyed to find a Coursera MOOC specialization that makes up this module.
Writing is not really something that can be taught, it is discovered through the process of writing your own work. Teaching can certainly help to refine and tune up a person’s writing, but the best way to become a writer is just to read loads and write even more.