This course is designed for advanced students who desire to work on their writing style and experiment with creativity and invention.  Both parts of this workshop use Gregory Roper’s The Writer’s Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing, which students should purchase on their own. See the pdf Table of Contents here. Students will complete up to eighteen assignments of from 50 to 600 words each (about 5000 words total in submitted work) for each part of this course. 

Letter grades will be assigned to a final portfolio of selected assignments, and I suggest ½ credit for each part of this course. Criterion is included to give students access to the online workshop space and to provide additional practice with grade-level essays.

Please visit my blog at wrasselings.blogspot.com  to see my own work on a few assignments. Navigate to July 2008 for Part One, and October 2008 for Part Two.

“Part One: Foundations” includes exercises using models from Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Dickens, Hemingway, Joyce, Sojourner Truth, Moses, and the Apostle Paul. Writers will consider the effects of small decisions in writing, reflect on Impressionism and Realism, and explore Rhetorical forms, law and morality, authority, and invention.

“Part Two: Precision Tools and Finer Crafts” is for those who have completed Part One.  It continues in Roper’s book and involves close work with Logic, Argument, and Negotiation using models from Aquinas, Cicero, a Pope, and a King. This is Rhetoric in action, a great apprenticeship for aspiring serious writers.

The course materials for each part of this course may be chosen as the courtesy document accompanying a Consultation.