BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing

This module is about developing your lens and understanding of the rapidly changing world, refining your specialism as a professional or /practitioner and improving your professional facing profile. The module is delivered across specific course groupings that capture the academic standards, core values and employment opportunities of your subject area. This module draws on the well-evidenced benefits of community-facing service learning to the local community, the local economy and you, the student. In this way it supports the University’s Graduate Attributes, providing opportunities to enrich your learning and develop skills for the workplace through engagement in real-world activities. Therefore, across this module you will undertake at least one externally facing activity. That might include live or simulation briefs, placements, virtual placements, community events, or a Collaborative Online International Learning project (COIL) in order to build your graduate attainment, consolidate your subject interest and support your career aspirations. 

What is a poem and what goes into a poem? How can we use and reuse poetry for different aims and agendas and how can we use poetry in different mediums, such as film, animation, performance, advertising, recording technology, virtual spaces. Building on Reading and Writing Poetry, Verse-atile considers the constantly changing landscape in poetry. These changes are heightened in the light of our digital and multimedia cultures. You'll place your work in this context with this module. The focus in this module is to explore and experiment with new and radical ways of exploring poetic practice. Each week we'll experiment with some of the cutting-edge practices in contemporary poetry, and explore different ways of presenting these. You'll study Ekphrastic Poetry, Projective Verse, Conceptual Verse, Hybridity, Film Poetry, Instapoems and Performance Poetry. Each week’s key concept or theme will be used as a way of considering different non-traditional forms. As such, the reading for each week will include a filmpoem, a performance piece and a non-traditional text form, as examples of the theme or concept we’ll explore in that session. Through this you will play with a diverse range of different forms and concepts; expanding and stretching your understanding of poetry, poetics and presentation. You will consider different and non-traditional forms of poetry for the digital age, in the Anthropocene, in a hypermodern context. Together, we'll move, on one large project, from concept through to execution - producing sequences of poems.

You will explore contemporary genre fiction – its conventions and its historical shifts – as a writer of text, radio, podcast and screen. This module aims to integrate the critical reading of Crime, Horror and Speculative Fiction with the student's own choice of writing assignment. You will examine theories of representation in various forms and cultures and consider past and contemporary markets, publication outlets and trends for different genre fiction texts. Especial attention will be paid to ways in which the popular fiction genres can be made more diverse and inclusive by means of addressing contemporary debates around sex, race, class and health through fiction. You will develop an understanding of the narrative approaches used in writing genre fiction. We will also consider the different target groups these works may be written for. You will analyse examples of popular fiction, and then use their acquired knowledge of the conventions and possibilities in those genres to create and evaluate examples of their writing.

The Independent Study Project enables you to work independently in an area of your choice and under the supervision of an appropriate member of staff, who then serves as the supervisor of that project. It allows you an opportunity to pursue an interest in a given subject / issue related to your degree and to produce extended creative and critical work to a greater depth and breadth than before. At the same time, it provides you with the chance to display the skills in organisation and research methods you’ve acquired in previous modules. This module provides the opportunity for students to conduct their own research into a negotiated subject of their choice within the areas Creative and Professional Writing. It requires students to demonstrate the analytical skills acquired over length of their degree, including the abilities to construct and sustain an argument, and to support it using evidence. This might include projects that are not limited by written text, and students are encouraged to consider mixed media, digital and experimental forms for their work that draws on, for example, their understanding of visual arts, virtual and augmented reality, audio-visual technologies. Independent research and self-motivation are key to this module and students will be required to organise and navigate their projects autonomously. You will be allocated a project supervisor to support your work and specialist lectures and writing retreats will be timetabled to instruct you in a variety of research methods.

The various futures of writing involve a number of emerging practices. Good writers and editors can put their skills to use in a myriad of professional careers, including content writing and editing, book and magazine publishing, corporate communication, web content development, arts promotion, advocacy, and many others. This plenary final year module will help you take stock of things you’ve learned and developed during your degree, and plan for success in your future. Although the career opportunities are wide and various for this discipline, all of them assume that practitioners have learned to handle text professionally and can apply key skills in a variety of industry contexts.  They require individuals adept in critical and efficient research skills. In this module, you will develop crucial research techniques alongside different writing registers to build your own portfolio as a professional writer. You will become familiar with professional fields such as marketing, content writing, writing residences and more. Assignments will build your skills in writing in multiple modes and mediums for communication in professional settings.  

The module aims to provide for the initiation of an in-depth individual writing project focussing specifically on the production of a first novel. The module will address some of the issues involved in researching and developing an extended narrative. Students will create the opening of an original novel together with a synopsis of the complete story and an account of how the project might be marketed once complete. Combining both classroom-based teaching, independent study, and tutor supervision, it aims to help students create the kind of documentation required to approach prospective publishers. This will lead from earlier modules such as Craft of Writing, The Writer’s Place and Life Writing to reconsider the key narrative and creative techniques and devices in long-form literature, as such it will help consolidate learning from previous modules and reconfigure it for larger and more complex projects.