Crafting the Essay: Individually-Paced Format

Bring your experiences to life on the page in this personal essay course. Through 10 assignments, we'll experiment with different essay formats to describe scenes, illustrate conflicts, narrate events, share memories, and extract meaning for yourself and your readers. As you progress through the course, you will use your senses to create vivid descriptions, observe and choose details that convey your perspective to readers, imagine experiences and describe events from other points of view, and deconstruct essays and use them to create new works of writing. You will work on each assignment for at least one week, engaging in all steps of the writing process: ideation, pre-writing, drafting, applying feedback, revising, editing, proofreading, and reflection. Individually paced writing courses are best suited for self-motivated writers with excellent time management skills who will maintain regular email correspondence with their instructors. Recommended length of enrollment: 6 months Time Commitment: 4-6 hours of independent work per week. Course Overview Learning Objectives: Employ pre-writing strategies to externalize ideas and evaluate which are the strongest Proofread, analyze, restructure, and revise drafts for submission Employ figurative language and literary devices to enhance your narratives Incorporate feedback on your writing and make appropriate changes Reflect on personal experiences and extract meaning from them in essays Write in a range of tones, for a variety of audiences Demonstrate empathy and different points of view Reflect on your writing process and growth in letters to your instructor Ask your instructor for help and have confidence discussing your writing with an adult