Mine was Creative Nonfiction, aka literary journalism. The teacher was a loud-mouthed crazy man who liked to make fun of people and swear a lot. He would basically let you write about anything you wanted and at my tight-ass Catholic school, that was a nice change. I wrote two pieces that he continues to use as examples in his classes on how to do the assignments correctly. One is called "Homelessness, Spitting and the American Dream" about a kid I knew in high school who's life goal was to become homeless and liked spitting on his own pants. The second is called "You Are An Asshole," basically about how everyone in the world in as asshole, and that's fine.
Submitted by peasantqueen on Thu, 03/06/2008 - 19:28.
My favorite college class was called Advanced Journalistic Writing, In it, I learned how to write seven different kinds of magazine/newspaper articles and a query letter (a letter that tries to sell your article idea to an editor) for each. Then I had to actually send out five of them to real magazines or newspapers. It was so scary having only two weeks to write something that was good enough to send to a magazine editor and not just turn in to a professor at school! But it was exciting too. The second article I sent out actually landed me a contract, which is really good odds in the magazine-article writing business. I learned so much from that class and it pushed me to really do something with my writing, which would have taken me a long time to do on my own.
Mine was Creative Nonfiction, aka literary journalism. The teacher was a loud-mouthed crazy man who liked to make fun of people and swear a lot. He would basically let you write about anything you wanted and at my tight-ass Catholic school, that was a nice change. I wrote two pieces that he continues to use as examples in his classes on how to do the assignments correctly. One is called "Homelessness, Spitting and the American Dream" about a kid I knew in high school who's life goal was to become homeless and liked spitting on his own pants. The second is called "You Are An Asshole," basically about how everyone in the world in as asshole, and that's fine.
My favorite college class was called Advanced Journalistic Writing, In it, I learned how to write seven different kinds of magazine/newspaper articles and a query letter (a letter that tries to sell your article idea to an editor) for each. Then I had to actually send out five of them to real magazines or newspapers. It was so scary having only two weeks to write something that was good enough to send to a magazine editor and not just turn in to a professor at school! But it was exciting too. The second article I sent out actually landed me a contract, which is really good odds in the magazine-article writing business. I learned so much from that class and it pushed me to really do something with my writing, which would have taken me a long time to do on my own.