Creative Writing (Joint Honours) BA (Hons)

Course modules

First year

• Exploring Creative Writing
• Writing Identity

Second year

• Writing Place
• Word, Image, Sound

Third year

• Professional Writing Skills
• Specialism Plus Negotiated Study
• Portfolio
• Uncreative Writing and Artificial Intelligence

Teaching and assessments

Overview

This degree programme is carefully designed to develop your potential by ensuring you encounter the full range of forms open to the 21st century creative writer, whilst also allowing you flexibility to focus, for assignments, on projects and genres that interest you most. We want you to learn that practicing a particular kind of writing can hone your craft in a different form (for example, dramatists learn so much about choreographing the natural movements of a voice on the page from writing free verse poetry).

In the first year, the focus is upon shorter work, and the importance of developing your editing and re-drafting skills; and your capacity to accept and evaluate feedback from others. This process will enable you to take a critical and reflective approach to your work (Both creative and reflective writing will be assessed).

At second year the assignments lengthen, and the focus upon research intensifies as you are expected to situate your own writing alongside your reading of other writers in your field.

In the final year, such knowledge is pushed further by making you consider how your sense of the ways in which creative work is published and marketed will help you understand how your own practice might fit in – or resist – contemporary conventions.

In all years, the modules reinforce the knowledge that reading and analysing the work of other practitioners – your fellow students included - will help you understand and develop your own formal and technical abilities.

Contact hours

Creative Writing and Drama

You will be taught through a combination of lectures, tutorials, seminars, group work and self-directed study. Assessment is mostly through coursework (presentations, essays and reports), although there are some short tests in the ‘Uncreative Writing and Artificial Intelligence’ module. Your precise timetable will depend on the optional modules you choose to take, however, in your first year you will normally attend around 12 hours of timetabled taught sessions (lectures and tutorials) each week, and we expect you to undertake at least 26 further hours of independent study to complete project work and research.

Creative Writing and Film Studies

You will be taught through a combination of lectures, tutorials, seminars, group work and self-directed study. Assessment is mostly through coursework (presentations, essays and reports), although there are some short tests in the ‘Uncreative Writing and Artificial Intelligence’ module. Your precise timetable will depend on the optional modules you choose to take, however, in your first year you will normally attend around 17 hours of timetabled taught sessions (lectures and tutorials) each week, and we expect you to undertake at least 23 further hours of independent study to complete project work and research.

Creative Writing and Journalism

For more information visit Journalism (Joint Honours) BA (Hons)