Academic Writing
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Academic Writing: SHSS 6620 (3 credits)
Writing Between The Lines
by Douglas Flemons, PhD
Now available for FSEHS students online using WebCT
Catalog Description
A user-friendly seminar on how to write clear, unpretentious academic prose. Covers technical issues,-sentence structure, punctuation, tenses, and idea development in a nontechnical manner. Includes strategies for creating and editing manuscripts and for researching, organizing, and writing literature reviews.
Course Overview
My high school choir director believed that tone deafness is a myth. Anyone, she said, can be taught to sing on pitch. Similarly, books such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain contend that anyone who can make marks on paper can learn to draw well. All that needs to be taught is a different way of seeing, a different way of relating to the object being rendered. The rest is just sweat and perseverance.
Following in this tradition, I believe that you can learn to write well. The purpose of this course is to point you in the right direction, give you a compass and something of a map, and send you on your way. The journey, the effort will be yours to make. Prepare yourself to work hard.
Your coach will, in the beginning, be concentrating on the editing component of writing. To edit well, you must attend to small particulars, discerning the difference between correct and incorrect punctuation and grammar, between elegant and clumsy sentences, between well and poorly developed ideas. This will entail your learning some basic compositional rules and accepting the necessity of becoming detail oriented.
Other topics can be introduced by you at any time. Your coach will be responsive to all questions and confusions. To learn how to write well, you will need to take some considerable risks, particularly those that will allow you to reorganize (if necessary) the set of rules you have been using to create and punctuate your sentences. Ask whatever questions will help you sort out your confusions.
When you devote yourself to putting the ideas from the course into practice, figuring out how to think on paper (or your computer screen), your writing (and, perhaps, you, too) will begin to change. The pleasure you will derive from your writing will almost always be hard won and well deserved.