policies ENGL227 Introduction
to creative nonfiction workshop
|
Need to be in touch with me?
LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com |
Fall 2016 Office Hours:
M/W 11:30-12:30 T 11:00-12:00 and by appointment. Need to make an appointment? Click here: https://goo.gl/3CqLfo |
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This workshop is designed to give you a thorough introduction to the genre of creative nonfiction as a reader and extensive practice in the genre as a writer. Creative Nonfiction is something of a popular trend in writing/reading these days. It is a difficult genre to define because it could include anything from what you read in the Sunday magazine to book length memoirs. It depends on who you ask. This class will focus more on what is traditionally identified as the personal essay, though we will take time to explore other and more experimental forms as well. It is a relatively short form, the personal essay, and it has a tremendous history. As a group of readers, we will develop a thoughtful working definition of the essay. We will challenge that definition as well.
At its heart, whatever form the genre takes, creative nonfiction is the effort by a writer to make sense of his or her everyday lived in life. The goal is not just to describe that life but to understand it and to understand the Big Questions (and sometimes some small and idiosyncratic questions) that arise out of lived in life. In writing about the particulars of one person’s experience, the author tries to give readers access to the complexity of a place or a person or a thing in our lives. When done well, it lets the reader reflect on his or her own experience in light of what these authors have to say about theirs. It is, as with all good literature, an evocative reading experience.
The class will be conducted as a writer’s workshop. You will be responsible to your peers for giving them reasonable, useful feedback on all of the essays that you produce for class. At the end of the semester, you will leave the class with a small portfolio of work that demonstrates your best writing from the semester. We will balance our time reading and writing in this genre this semester because it is a genre that is too often misunderstood. To not understand this genre only leads to bad writing.
COURSE GOALS
By the end of this course you will
TEXTS
Lee Gutkind (editor)
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction
Ariel Levy (Author), Robert Atwan (Editor)
The Best American Essays 2015
And those texts made available on this website as needed.
REQUIREMENTS
Attendance. We do a lot of work in class, and it is work that requires full participation from all of us. Class meets once a week, which means that missing one class is missing one full week of class. Missing two classes will hurt your final grade. If you miss more than three classes, you will fail the course. Finally, excessive late arrivals will accumulate to equal at least one absence. Absence is not an excuse for late work. Late work will not be accepted. All that said: if life circumstances require you to miss enough class that it will affect your grade, see me.
Reader’s Notes. As I indicate in the description for this course, this is a popular genre, perhaps, but not a very well understood genre. So trying to understand what makes it work, what its parts are, what its purpose is, how it gets the job done is why we will read and talk about all these essays. To help us with this, you’ll write a series of one page, single-spaced, typed set of notes about each of the readings. Generally, I will be asking you to do what I describe here: try to figure out what the point of the essay is, how the author is getting that job done, and what that teaches you about the genre of nonfiction. Sometimes I will have more specific questions for you to respond to in your notes, and if I do I will tell you in class or post it online This is informal writing. And I mean one page. Expect that I will not be the only one reading these notes and that your classmates will too. These notes are working documents in our class. More information is available for this assignment and all other assignments on the website for this course.
Writer’s Notebook. The writer’s notebook is a collection of informal writing. Part of your notebook will be writing you do outside of class. Part of your notebook will be writing you do in class. I think of the writer’s notebook as a place to try out and test possible ideas in writing that you might pursue more fully in some of your formal drafts. Not everything you write in your notebook will become anything, but some of it might. I will collect it every week. More details are available on this assignment and all other assignments on our course website.
We meet once a week so the word “notebook” is meant figuratively rather than literally. If you like the physical sensation of writing in some sort of notebook. Fine. But you’ll need two of them so you can turn one in to me each week. If it’s possible for you to keep your notebook on a computer (as I do), than you can just turn in new pages to me each week. I’ll have WN folders for folks who turn in loose pages.
Publication Talk. Early in the semester, you and a partner will select a journal from the new pages website (http://www.newpages.com/), and, over the course of the semester, you’ll read up on that journal. At the end of the semester you will do a five to ten minute presentation about the journal as a possible venue for publication. More information about this assignment and all other assignments is available on the course website.
Drafts for Feedback. That cumbersome title is what I’m calling formal, relatively complete drafts, that you will turn in to me approximately four times during the semester. Each of the drafts will be workshopped in class. You will need to come talk to me in a conference for at least one of them. You’ll get feedback from me and from your classmates on all of them. You’ll revise this work for inclusion in your midterm and final portfolios. Workshops, conferences, and portfolios are described below and elsewhere on our course website. While we will talk about the kinds of essays you might turn in for feedback in class, there is no prescribed topic for each essay. What you write about will be of your own choosing. I’m always happy to help you figure this out, and your writer’s notebook should help you figure out what you want to write about as well—and it should be a place for me to tell you what of your stuff I think is worth developing (though you may not listen to me—which is OK). More information about what I’ll expect in a Draft for feedback is available on our course website.
Workshopping. We are not a large class and it might be possible to do whole-class workshops—though, as you can see on the syllabus, we will, at the very least, do just that at the end of our semester. But we will always have some manner of workshop or peer-conversation before formal writing is due. Depending on the shape of the workshop, you will be responsible for various tasks—from bringing in a draft for others to read to reading and commenting on the drafts of others prior to class. Whatever you are required to do will be outlined either in class or online, and I will expect that you will come to the workshop appropriately prepared.
Please note, feedback during workshops should help your colleagues become better writers. Feedback should not be needlessly hurtful or harsh but useless. We will conduct civil workshops in this class. At midterm and at the end of the semester, you will receive written feedback on your workshop performance as part of your formal evaluation and letter grade.
Conferences. Once a semester, you should take time to come to talk to me about your writing. You can choose when is the right time to have a conference with me—but if you put it off until the last second you’ll get no sympathy from me if I can’t fit you in. You can make an appoint ment to see me using my online google.doc of a schedule. This link, https://goo.gl/3CqLfo, can be found here, at the top of every page of this website, and in my signature block of my email. All weekly open times are listed there. You can edit at will. Real writers meet with editors regularly, and that is how meetings with me will work this semester. I will serve as editor and reader to whatever material you are working on. Whatever material you want me to work with is what you should bring to the conference. Coming to the conference unprepared will make me furious like you’ve never seen.
Portfolios. You will turn in a portfolio for formal evaluation twice during the semester. At midterm, you will turn in a short, reflective portfolio that includes a cover letter, some new writing, and some revised writing. At the end of the semester, you will turn in roughly 15 to 20 pages of revised, polished writing—the best work you are able to turn in to me.
EVALUATION
You will not receive letter grades for individual assignments in this class. You will receive extensive written feedback on all formal writing assignments in the form of a letter. I will make samples of these letters available to you before the first major writing assignment is due so you have a sense of what this feedback looks like and how it is connected to your final letter grade. This feedback should also serve as a guide for your workshop comments to your fellow writers.
Comments on informal writing shouldn’t be treated like evaluation but rather like an ongoing conversation between you and me: think of it as a talk between us, only in written form.
This form of evaluation is called portfolio assessment. I use it because I want to be able to consider all the parts of your performance in our class, not just how good your final drafts of your papers are. I want to consider where you started and how much you improved. I want to consider how hard you tried (or didn’t try) in class. I want to consider how you contribute to class on a daily basis. I have found that this kind of grading rewards hard-working students as well as students that are just naturally good at writing. And, for that reason, I think it is the most fair way to run a writing classroom. I hope you’ll come to agree.
At midterm and at the end of the semester you will receive a “grade-so-far” and a “final grade” letter respectively. They will be come attached to your midterm and final portfolio returns. In these letters you will receive a letter grade and an overview of your performance in the class up to that point. I have never encountered a student who didn’t have a clear sense of how they were doing in my class based on this system of evaluation, but if you should feel that you don’t know how you are doing, come see me. We’ll figure it out.
Different requirements require different kinds and amounts of effort; therefore, different assignments have different weight in terms of evaluation.
Here is a rough breakdown of how things are weighted this semester:
Ultimately, your success in this class depends on the following:
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. If you are caught plagiarizing you will fail the course.
Students with learning disabilities. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented learning disability should come to see me with written documentation of the specific disability and suggested accommodations before the end of the first week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time.
The Writing Studio. Located in the Academic Achievement Center, on the bottom floor of the Library, the Writing Studio is available to any and all students at whatever level of expertise you might be at. They are a marvelous resource for this class. You can talk to them at any stage of your writing—from brainstorming, to drafting, to editing. If you are interested in getting useful and thorough feedback, the Writing Studio is a good place to go. The work they do will reinforce everything we are doing in this class. Finally, I will look kindly on any student who makes good use of this service.
Welcome to the class.
This workshop is designed to give you a thorough introduction to the genre of creative nonfiction as a reader and extensive practice in the genre as a writer. Creative Nonfiction is something of a popular trend in writing/reading these days. It is a difficult genre to define because it could include anything from what you read in the Sunday magazine to book length memoirs. It depends on who you ask. This class will focus more on what is traditionally identified as the personal essay, though we will take time to explore other and more experimental forms as well. It is a relatively short form, the personal essay, and it has a tremendous history. As a group of readers, we will develop a thoughtful working definition of the essay. We will challenge that definition as well.
At its heart, whatever form the genre takes, creative nonfiction is the effort by a writer to make sense of his or her everyday lived in life. The goal is not just to describe that life but to understand it and to understand the Big Questions (and sometimes some small and idiosyncratic questions) that arise out of lived in life. In writing about the particulars of one person’s experience, the author tries to give readers access to the complexity of a place or a person or a thing in our lives. When done well, it lets the reader reflect on his or her own experience in light of what these authors have to say about theirs. It is, as with all good literature, an evocative reading experience.
The class will be conducted as a writer’s workshop. You will be responsible to your peers for giving them reasonable, useful feedback on all of the essays that you produce for class. At the end of the semester, you will leave the class with a small portfolio of work that demonstrates your best writing from the semester. We will balance our time reading and writing in this genre this semester because it is a genre that is too often misunderstood. To not understand this genre only leads to bad writing.
COURSE GOALS
By the end of this course you will
- Have developed a working definition of the genre of Creative Nonfiction
- Have had extensive practice in writing in the genre, culminating in a portfolio of your best work
- Have had practice in the writing process and the writing workshop in general
- Have learned something about the opportunities for publication in the genre
TEXTS
Lee Gutkind (editor)
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction
Ariel Levy (Author), Robert Atwan (Editor)
The Best American Essays 2015
And those texts made available on this website as needed.
REQUIREMENTS
Attendance. We do a lot of work in class, and it is work that requires full participation from all of us. Class meets once a week, which means that missing one class is missing one full week of class. Missing two classes will hurt your final grade. If you miss more than three classes, you will fail the course. Finally, excessive late arrivals will accumulate to equal at least one absence. Absence is not an excuse for late work. Late work will not be accepted. All that said: if life circumstances require you to miss enough class that it will affect your grade, see me.
Reader’s Notes. As I indicate in the description for this course, this is a popular genre, perhaps, but not a very well understood genre. So trying to understand what makes it work, what its parts are, what its purpose is, how it gets the job done is why we will read and talk about all these essays. To help us with this, you’ll write a series of one page, single-spaced, typed set of notes about each of the readings. Generally, I will be asking you to do what I describe here: try to figure out what the point of the essay is, how the author is getting that job done, and what that teaches you about the genre of nonfiction. Sometimes I will have more specific questions for you to respond to in your notes, and if I do I will tell you in class or post it online This is informal writing. And I mean one page. Expect that I will not be the only one reading these notes and that your classmates will too. These notes are working documents in our class. More information is available for this assignment and all other assignments on the website for this course.
Writer’s Notebook. The writer’s notebook is a collection of informal writing. Part of your notebook will be writing you do outside of class. Part of your notebook will be writing you do in class. I think of the writer’s notebook as a place to try out and test possible ideas in writing that you might pursue more fully in some of your formal drafts. Not everything you write in your notebook will become anything, but some of it might. I will collect it every week. More details are available on this assignment and all other assignments on our course website.
We meet once a week so the word “notebook” is meant figuratively rather than literally. If you like the physical sensation of writing in some sort of notebook. Fine. But you’ll need two of them so you can turn one in to me each week. If it’s possible for you to keep your notebook on a computer (as I do), than you can just turn in new pages to me each week. I’ll have WN folders for folks who turn in loose pages.
Publication Talk. Early in the semester, you and a partner will select a journal from the new pages website (http://www.newpages.com/), and, over the course of the semester, you’ll read up on that journal. At the end of the semester you will do a five to ten minute presentation about the journal as a possible venue for publication. More information about this assignment and all other assignments is available on the course website.
Drafts for Feedback. That cumbersome title is what I’m calling formal, relatively complete drafts, that you will turn in to me approximately four times during the semester. Each of the drafts will be workshopped in class. You will need to come talk to me in a conference for at least one of them. You’ll get feedback from me and from your classmates on all of them. You’ll revise this work for inclusion in your midterm and final portfolios. Workshops, conferences, and portfolios are described below and elsewhere on our course website. While we will talk about the kinds of essays you might turn in for feedback in class, there is no prescribed topic for each essay. What you write about will be of your own choosing. I’m always happy to help you figure this out, and your writer’s notebook should help you figure out what you want to write about as well—and it should be a place for me to tell you what of your stuff I think is worth developing (though you may not listen to me—which is OK). More information about what I’ll expect in a Draft for feedback is available on our course website.
Workshopping. We are not a large class and it might be possible to do whole-class workshops—though, as you can see on the syllabus, we will, at the very least, do just that at the end of our semester. But we will always have some manner of workshop or peer-conversation before formal writing is due. Depending on the shape of the workshop, you will be responsible for various tasks—from bringing in a draft for others to read to reading and commenting on the drafts of others prior to class. Whatever you are required to do will be outlined either in class or online, and I will expect that you will come to the workshop appropriately prepared.
Please note, feedback during workshops should help your colleagues become better writers. Feedback should not be needlessly hurtful or harsh but useless. We will conduct civil workshops in this class. At midterm and at the end of the semester, you will receive written feedback on your workshop performance as part of your formal evaluation and letter grade.
Conferences. Once a semester, you should take time to come to talk to me about your writing. You can choose when is the right time to have a conference with me—but if you put it off until the last second you’ll get no sympathy from me if I can’t fit you in. You can make an appoint ment to see me using my online google.doc of a schedule. This link, https://goo.gl/3CqLfo, can be found here, at the top of every page of this website, and in my signature block of my email. All weekly open times are listed there. You can edit at will. Real writers meet with editors regularly, and that is how meetings with me will work this semester. I will serve as editor and reader to whatever material you are working on. Whatever material you want me to work with is what you should bring to the conference. Coming to the conference unprepared will make me furious like you’ve never seen.
Portfolios. You will turn in a portfolio for formal evaluation twice during the semester. At midterm, you will turn in a short, reflective portfolio that includes a cover letter, some new writing, and some revised writing. At the end of the semester, you will turn in roughly 15 to 20 pages of revised, polished writing—the best work you are able to turn in to me.
EVALUATION
You will not receive letter grades for individual assignments in this class. You will receive extensive written feedback on all formal writing assignments in the form of a letter. I will make samples of these letters available to you before the first major writing assignment is due so you have a sense of what this feedback looks like and how it is connected to your final letter grade. This feedback should also serve as a guide for your workshop comments to your fellow writers.
Comments on informal writing shouldn’t be treated like evaluation but rather like an ongoing conversation between you and me: think of it as a talk between us, only in written form.
This form of evaluation is called portfolio assessment. I use it because I want to be able to consider all the parts of your performance in our class, not just how good your final drafts of your papers are. I want to consider where you started and how much you improved. I want to consider how hard you tried (or didn’t try) in class. I want to consider how you contribute to class on a daily basis. I have found that this kind of grading rewards hard-working students as well as students that are just naturally good at writing. And, for that reason, I think it is the most fair way to run a writing classroom. I hope you’ll come to agree.
At midterm and at the end of the semester you will receive a “grade-so-far” and a “final grade” letter respectively. They will be come attached to your midterm and final portfolio returns. In these letters you will receive a letter grade and an overview of your performance in the class up to that point. I have never encountered a student who didn’t have a clear sense of how they were doing in my class based on this system of evaluation, but if you should feel that you don’t know how you are doing, come see me. We’ll figure it out.
Different requirements require different kinds and amounts of effort; therefore, different assignments have different weight in terms of evaluation.
Here is a rough breakdown of how things are weighted this semester:
- Writer’s Notebook 15%
- Reader’s Notes 15%
- Drafts For Feedback
- (4 drafts worth 10% each) 40%
- Publication Talk 10%
- Midterm Portfolio 10%
- Final Portfolio 10%
Ultimately, your success in this class depends on the following:
- Fulfilling all of the requirements listed above,
- The quality of your written and oral work,
- Your efforts to try new things and think in new ways.
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. If you are caught plagiarizing you will fail the course.
Students with learning disabilities. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented learning disability should come to see me with written documentation of the specific disability and suggested accommodations before the end of the first week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time.
The Writing Studio. Located in the Academic Achievement Center, on the bottom floor of the Library, the Writing Studio is available to any and all students at whatever level of expertise you might be at. They are a marvelous resource for this class. You can talk to them at any stage of your writing—from brainstorming, to drafting, to editing. If you are interested in getting useful and thorough feedback, the Writing Studio is a good place to go. The work they do will reinforce everything we are doing in this class. Finally, I will look kindly on any student who makes good use of this service.
Welcome to the class.