6 Courses

Memoir and Personal Essay: Managing Your Reader

Platform: Coursera

Institution: Wesleyan University

Started: 01/07/2019

Finished: 01/09/2020

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Writing in First Person Point of View

Platform: Coursera

Institution: Wesleyan University

Started: 01/07/2019

Finished: 01/09/2020

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Writing a Personal Essay

Platform: Coursera

Institution: Wesleyan University

Started: 01/07/2019

Finished: 01/09/2020

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Writing Stories About Ourselves

Platform: Coursera

Institution: Wesleyan University

Started: 01/07/2019

Finished: 01/09/2020

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Poetry: How to Read a Poem

Platform: FutureLearn

Institution: University of York

Started: 04/07/2019

Finished:

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High Impact Business Writing

Platform: Coursera

Institution: University of California, Irvine

Started: 31/08/2015

Finished: 04/09/2015

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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

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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

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The Penguin Guide to Punctuation

Author: R.L. Trask

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1997

Started: 28/04/2021

Finished: 08/06/2021

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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

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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.