Hashimoto's Advanced Writing--English 310

When I first started teaching English 310, I thought I would simply set up a course where my good student writers would write whatever they wanted to write and bring those things to class for critiques. (That, of course, is the main part of a typical "workshop" writing course.) But I discovered that I quickly got bored. I got a lot of grandma stories and stories about dead pets and vacations. Mostly, these stories were simple, simply organized, and predictable--and I had a hard time getting my students to explore, to experiment, to risk doing what they hadn't done before.

So I started structuring the course a little more--giving small exercises; introducing some of the craft of non-fiction in a more organized way. As I conceive the course now, I give a fair number of assignments that help students to begin to explore some of the techniques that good writers use--we'll experiment with some of the small signals they use to shift blame, to deny guilt, to claim more than they can claim, to move from one occasion to another. We'll work with lists; we'll practice bluffs; we'll explore the power of names and repetitions. We'll also explore associational writing and the effect such writing has on the modern essay.

Because many student writers--even good student writers--have not read much non-fiction, we'll do a fair amount of reading, too and work on developing a vocabulary to talk about our reading. We'll read samples of contemporary essayists and keep a reading log. We'll read things others bring to class. We'll also read almost everything we write out loud or in small groups.