Long-Form Writing Laboratory

Instructor: Liza Featherstone & Cécile Malaspina Date & Time: August 22nd, September 5th, September 26th, October 17th, October 31st, November 14th, December 5th, December 19th. 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: What makes a good idea for a writing project? How do you move from a curiosity/impulse to an idea/argument? What would you tell an editor to persuade them to publish it? How do you follow through? This hands-on Writing Lab is a first collaboration between Liza Featherstone, a journalism professor and a columnist for Jacobin and The New Republic, and the philosopher Cécile Malaspina, programmer at the New Centre and at the College International de Philosophie. It aims at supporting a writing project over eight sessions, through targeted workshops, prompt writing exercises, and a series of short outside-of-class assignments, culminating in a draft that will have been progressively reviewed by fellow students and by the workshop leaders. The Lab is designed to address challenges of the writing process from start to finish, from the developing of robust ideas to the formulation of a pitch or proposal, from draft to fully edited submission. A combination of instruction and discussions, in-session groups activities, as well as assignments, this Workshop will help you to situate yourself as a writer, to argue with lucidity, and to identify and speak to your audience. You will practice initiating and sustaining a writing practice, finding structure and flow, as well parrying self-doubt by defining the scope of your argument and grounding it in evidence. Students will receive feedback on their final draft from peers as well as Instructors. The Workshop is supported by breaks of several weeks, to allow participants to write. Students from any discipline and working in any genre – whether academic, criticism, curatorial, fiction, theory, polemic, journalism, memoir – are welcome. Final projects are not limited to text and may take visual and/or auditory form.

SESSION ONE: WHAT MAKES AN IDEA FOR A WRITING PROJECT GOOD?
After a general outline of the course structure and final project outcomes, students and workshop leaders will introduce themselves and their writing objectives for the workshop. How do you move from a curiosity / impulse to an idea / argument? What would you tell an editor to persuade them to publish it? In the first session, instructors will provide guidelines for the upcoming pitching exercise, which will be due in the subsequent session. We will discuss how to move your project from topic to idea and how to explain it to funders, editors and of course yourselves. We will also discuss the final work, which will be due in the sixth session, allowing for review from peers and workshop leaders, and culminating in a revised draft, which will be due in week seven. We encourage students to limit their final work to 2500 words / 10-20 minute films or sound work in order to make the best of feedback. Larger projects are welcome but will be assessed based on samples from the text / visual / sound material.

SESSION TWO: PITCH PERFECT
Assignment for Session Two: write up your idea in required form: as a pitch to an editor / book proposal / curatorial project / grant proposal etc. Students will split into groups to read out the assignment submitted for this week. They will discuss the strengths of the pitch to editor / book proposal / curatorial project / grant proposal, giving and receiving feedback in a spirit of risk-taking and enabling comments. Instructors will visit with the small groups, guiding and offering feedback.

SESSION THREE: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? WRITING AND SELF-DOUBT
Assignment due for session three: edit your pitch, incorporating feedback from Week Two and write a first draft of the introduction to your project. This session will focus on entitlement / imposter syndrome, revisiting writers and their self-doubt from Dante to Merleau Ponty and Mark Fisher. We will discuss what stops you from writing, and what gets you writing, thinking about habits & routines as survival strategies. The focus will be on establishing expertise: where does authority come from and how do you ground your claims enough to marshall confidence in your own writing? The group will workshop the un-muddling of ideas, focusing on the drafting of introductions as an exercise in setting up argument and story, as limiting scope.

SESSION FOUR: ARGUMENTS & EVIDENCE Assignment due for Session Four: turn pitch onto roadmap / plan for final piece, centered around the key evidence that grounds your argument / project. Session Four will be dedicated to the types of structures that can hold arguments. In a group discussion, students will generate different kinds of arguments and evidence, while also considering what sorts of mistakes can disqualify an argument. Splitting into groups, students will present the strongest version of their project’s argument to each other, discussing difficulties and strategies for refining and substantiating key arguments.

SESSION FIVE: WRITING AS COMMUNICATION:
Assignment due for Session Five: break main project into parts and write an abstract for each part and bullet point outline for the sections. In this session we will workshop different styles of writing and find the language specific to a chosen audience. Breaking into groups, students will reformulate their project in different genres and styles, experimenting with the epistolary style, the diary style, presenting their project as a news item, or as an abstract for a scholarly essay etc. The exercises will help students render explicit the assumptions we make, or differences we fail to take into consideration, about our potential readers. The emphasis will be on foregrounding the purpose and objective of a given piece of writing. Does it aim to persuade, rectify misconceptions, propose new arguments, explore unchartered territory …? Does it aim at a blurring of genres and an experimentation with language, or at the bite of concision and clarity?

SESSION SIX: PRESENTATIONS OF FINAL PROJECTS
Assignement due for session six: submit and present first draft of final project. Feedback session: students split into small groups to present a first draft of their final projects to each other and receive feedback. This will be followed by a group discussion elaborating strategies for critically re-reading and revising one’s own project.

WEEK SIX: DELIVERY OF FINAL DRAFT
Assignment due for Session Six: students form pairs to read each other’s first draft. In the first part of this session students will form pairs to give each other feedback on their first drafts.The emphasis will be on identifying and providing positive reinforcement for effective writing strategies, as well as highlighting the visible effects of workable methods. Each student signs up for an in-session individual feedback slot with one of the instructors. This will be followed by a group discussion, where students read out particularly effective sections of each other’s work.

SESSION SEVEN: WRITING = REWRITING:
Consignment for Session Seven: submission of revised draft . How do you edit yourself? The final Session will revisit the transition from writing as the generation of raw material, to writing as the emergence of structure, dynamics, and refinement of argument. The Session will be dedicated to self-editing exercises and strategies.

SESSION EIGHT: DEBRIEF
Assignment for Session Eight: Resubmission of final essay, having incorporated comments and editorial strategies from Session Seven. The final session of the Workshop will consist in recapping and debriefing. Students will be encouraged to formulate a personalized writing strategy and criteria by which to assess and chart the dynamic development of their strengths and the progressive overcoming of difficulties.

 

IMAGE: Murray Library, Messiah University.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.