Hello all! I’m excited to have you in class this semester.
When I’m not teaching, I’m most often writing. I’ve had the chance to think about this subject from a few angles in my professional life: as a speechwriter, as a journalist, as an author and critic, and as a teacher. In graduate school and in my teaching since, I’ve focused on writing’s relation to what we experience and otherwise learn while we’re out in the world. My work in that time has often been creative in nature, for people reading something partly or entirely for pleasure, but I think there’s a common equation in most forms of writing, one that involves transmitting thoughts, feelings, and understandings through an imperfect and often unnatural medium. In that manner, writing is a skill and a practice we can undertake to make that transmission closer to our individual and shared ideals.
I believe it’s useful for us to think about writing this way, as an act that’s learnable and replicable. Writing well isn’t something you’re born with. It doesn’t require magic or inspiration to accomplish. It’s a practice. One you get better at each time you put your pen to paper, or your cursor to a Word doc (even if it doesn’t always feel that way). As you read and think about written works like novels, speeches, poems, movie scripts, etc., you expand your understanding of what writing can be. You think about who might pick up your writing—friends, family members, the public—and begin to shape your words and sentences to speak to them more directly.
What is it that only your writing can bring to these people? How can you best write what you mean? Yes, writing is an act of communication with shortcomings, but it also has unique qualities that can only be achieved through careful study of what writing is in a broad sense and what you’d like your writing to become. Besides, all of us at one point or another will have to write. This class, therefore, is as much for the math student as it is for the future novelist.
To this end, we’ll spend the semester focusing on writing’s three stages: the before, the during, and the after.
Before: We’ll consider how research and planning are essential tools of writing and communicating. Research helps us understand what we think and how to share those thoughts with others. We’ll hear from members of the City Tech library about how you can use their collections to complete assignments in this class and in others you’ll take during your time at City Tech. You’ll also learn about how you can bring your writing into conversation with others through citations and references. Finally, you’ll develop techniques to carry out before you start writing to make the writing process more efficient and to minimize the number of drafts you need to realize your aims.
During: In this class, I’ll ask you to write in a variety of forms and genres. Some of them might be distant from the reason you’re in school. But I believe just about all of them will have a kernel of usefulness to you, even if it’s only to understand that it’s a form you rarely want to write in. By engaging with these forms as writers and not just as readers, we can better examine them. We can understand what separates them from other forms, what audiences expect when they read them, and what we as writers might take from one form to use in another.
After: Being a reader is the most essential quality of being a writer. It’s how we understand what’s possible and how we can borrow from others so that what we put on the page can approach our internal voice. We’ll read and talk about what we’ve read regularly, both your work and that of your classmates, as well as the work of writers throughout history. By looking at what others have accomplished, we can also understand the written word’s power and the responsibilities that come with being a writer.
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