Welcome To Creative Writing!
• Gain skills in expressing ourselves with originality, creativity, and clarity in stories, poetry, and personal essays.
• Identify the successful elements of an effective piece of creative writing.
• Experience being in a writing community and learn to give and receive useful feedback.
• Experience writing as a tool for intellectual exploration, self-discovery, and creative expression. (I hope that the rewards of this process will encourage you to be writers-for-life, whether or not you choose creative writing as a career.)
Strategies:
• Keep a writer’s journals for in-class exercises and homework assignments.
• Share with partners and small groups.
• Read models from published and student work.
• Revise.
• Complete final, polished poems, stories and essays.
Student Expectations:
• Come to class, with your journals, every day, on time.
• Write every day.
• Be willing to experiment and take risks as a writer.
• Share your writing and ideas with small and large groups. Support others who are sharing their work.
Teacher Commitments:
• Keep it fun.
• Push each student to a higher level of creativity and skill.
• Provide honest, supportive, and useful feedback on writing and be available for conferences.
• Be knowledgeable and well-prepared.
Reading:
We will read many examples of effective, interesting, and thought-provoking poems, memoirs, short stories, essays, and writing about writing.
Journals: (See handout for more information)
We will write in our journals every day. They will be our workbooks, our play space, our place to whine, laugh, discover, practice, make mistakes, experiment.
For your journals, you may use:
1. A spiral notebook
2. A fancy-dancy journal
3. A composition notebook
• Every day, when we arrive in class, we will warm up with a freewrite-- called a BOP (Beginning Of the Period freewrite).
We will read many examples of effective, interesting, and thought-provoking poems, memoirs, short stories, essays, and writing about writing.
Journals: (See handout for more information)
We will write in our journals every day. They will be our workbooks, our play space, our place to whine, laugh, discover, practice, make mistakes, experiment.
For your journals, you may use:
1. A spiral notebook
2. A fancy-dancy journal
3. A composition notebook
• Every day, when we arrive in class, we will warm up with a freewrite-- called a BOP (Beginning Of the Period freewrite).
• Generally, we will do in-class writing exercises, also in our journals.
• Usually, you will have a journal assignment for homework, which should take no longer than twenty minutes (at least a page).
• Usually, you will have a journal assignment for homework, which should take no longer than twenty minutes (at least a page).