This writing course is designed to improve your ability to write in English by giving your writing a clear purpose. You can be informing, speaking truth to power in news and feature journalism, or writing copy that moves products off supermarket shelves: selling copy. The kind of writing you will study here is the kind of writing that can earn you a living. Most of it is journalism. But you can also try writing advertising copy for a traditional press advertisement, a TV commercial, or an internet advertisement. We will also look at public relations (PR) and how to write Press Releases for a company or a government. By examining and practicing a range of journalistic, advertising and PR techniques, we will aim to help you develop a range of writing styles. In class, we will analyse some classic journalism, advertising copy and PR techniques and put ourselves in the shoes of people in classic selling dilemmas. How do you sell twist drills? How do you improve the image of a dictator? How do you describe a war? And then we’ll try to do better. For a preview of the weekly material, please download the weekly material from the course homepage before the class, (click on the URL below), bring it to class and take notes during the class.

This course should help students develop the skills required for writing basic journalism, advertising and PR materials in English. Students will learn some of the skills of commercial writing, writing to inform consumers of news, and to persuade consumers to buy or believe. You’ll write features, book and film reviews, reportage, advertising and PR. Ideally, you should come away from this class with an acute awareness of the power of the written word – the power to persuade, move, enchant, fool and convince – and even more of your ability to write for a specific purpose, not to express yourself but to express what readerships want to know, and maybe think, and what consumers want to know, or be seduced into believing. That is, to write to order, not impulse. Whether you want to write to inform through journalism or to write to persuade consumers through advertising or propaganda, you’ll be very welcome in this class.