Spring 2024 Detailed Description: Writing for Digital Media

Focused on creative uses of multimedia in composition, this course will cover traditional nonfiction elements such as sensory details, narrative, and expressing the human condition, while also including visual, audio, and electronic text to engage readers. Like an artist’s paintbrush, the computer can be a creative tool in the writing process. Exploring methods, forms, and functions of works of both print and digital nonfiction will provide students with context and the foundational skills to express themselves through multimedia writing projects such as video, Google Maps, and the web. Writers will become composers, telling their stories with digital media.  

This Writing for Digital Media section aims to introduce the genre of creative nonfiction while also encouraging you, as writers, to think outside the box and consider new forms of writing, both through the course readings and your own writing. Observe and explore the world around you and always listen to your broccoli. 

This section of ENGL 501 is open to general enrollment/all majors. 

Spring 2024 Special Topic: Tracking our Lives: How Music Stories Us

This particular section of Creative Non-fiction will explore the ways in which our experiences with music shape our stories—how listening to (and/or making) music defines and transforms us. Examining a variety of modes in which writers engage with music, we will develop our own approaches to articulating the   meaning of music in our own lives. The class will begin with describing and analyzing/reviewing music, leading to forms of personal contextualizing—articulating the ways in which music affects or creates our experiences. Students need not have any formal or technical understanding of music to be successful in the course. Prereq: ENGL 401