Advanced Writing Workshop

**Please note that our curricula are under constant review and may be adjusted to suit the needs of our students. These changes may take place more quickly than can be reflected on this site at a given moment in time. We will update periodically.

Advanced Writing Workshop, Grades 11-12:

Students appropriate for this course have received a teacher recommendation or successfully completed either #122-CreativeWriting: College Preparatory or #160-Writing Fiction: Honors.

Advanced Writing Workshop is an opportunity for writers to expand on the portfolio of work they developed in Creative Writing and/or Fiction Writing. Students will approach the creative process in the same manner, building on the importance of the word and the poetic image to convey meaning. There will, however, be greater opportunity to focus on fiction writing, multi-media works, and publishing in this course. Students will be given the time to write and their choice of products. Students will focus more on depth of revision and craft than on generation of a large number of new pieces. Students will develop, refine, and present a substantial portfolio by the end of the course. The culminating activity (final exam) for the course is a "Book Release Event" in which our newly published authors will perform a selection of their work in front of the class and discuss their writing process and style.

Enduring Understandings:

Students are a part of the community of writers that is thriving in the real world.

Creative expression is something everyone is capable of accomplishing given the right circumstances.

Writing is a way to understand ourselves and the world.

We are all capable of way more than we thought just yesterday.

Unit 1: Mining Your Older Work/Deep Revision

Unit 2: Freewrites/Powerwrites

Unit 3: Questions of Memory

Unit 4: Poetry of Place/Taking Inventory/THINGS

Unit 5: Drafting

Unit 6: Rooting out Sentimentality and Teen Angst

Unit 7: The Workshop--Revision/Line Breaks/Peer Editing

Unit 8: How to Read Aloud

Unit 9: Microfiction/Fiction Writing

Unit 10: Chasing Down The Rabbit Holes

Unit 11: Presentation/Performance

Unit 12: Living Authors/Your place in the community of writers

Unit 13: Publishing your work

*note: the order of these units is fluid and many units are repeated

Grading Weights:

Portfolio 70%

Participation/Presentation 30%