Advanced Freelance Writing

DESCRIPTION

This course develops and sharpens your writing skills largely through interaction with a professional, published writer, who becomes your tutor and mentor. You will read about different writing techniques, you will conduct research and interviews, and plan projects.

Freelance writing is a highly competitive field. Successful freelance writers not only have good writing skills, they have a ‘nose’ for a good story, a mastery of their chosen area of writing, the ability to write quickly and succinctly, good interpersonal skills, and a wide range of useful contacts.

While all these career-building skills are important, they obviously take time to develop. This course builds on skills and experience you might already have. It assumes that you have a solid understanding of writing. You may already have had something published. If you want to build on your past experience and skill though; this is exactly what this course is designed for.

LESSON STRUCTURE

There are eight lessons in this course:

1. Introduction.
2. Writing Themes, Sentence Structure, Summary Skills, Theme Development
3. Writing a Regular Column
4. Newsletters, News Columns, Criticism Journalism
5. Educational Writing
6. Interviewing Skills, Illustrating an article, Putting it all together
7. Scientific Writing
8. Technical Writing, Statistics
9. Writing a Biographical Story
10. Developing a draft plan, Research, Writing the final manuscript
11. Writing a News Article
12. Analysing a news article; writing and illustrating a sporting event
13. Fiction Writing
14. Category Writing; Mainstream Writing; Characteristics of good fiction, Forming and developing an idea.
15. Other Writing
16. TV & Radio Scripts, Science Fiction, Conducting a Survey; Developing a Story.

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

AIMS

Review basic writing skills and discuss theme development

Develop skills in writing a regular magazine or newspaper column.

Describe the key elements of educational writing.

Describe the key elements of technical writing.

Develop skills in interviewing and preparing a biographical story.

Develop skills in writing news articles.

Develop skills in writing fiction.

Describe other writing styles including script writing. 

DELIVERY

Correspondence