Creative Writing In The Digital Age

Creative Writing in the Digital Age explores the vast array of opportunities that technology provides the Creative Writing teacher, ranging from effective online workshop models to methods that blur the boundaries of genre. From social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to more advanced software like Inform 7, the book investigates the benefits and potential challenges these technologies present instructors in the classroom. Written with the everyday instructor in mind, the book includes practical classroom lessons that can be easily adapted to creative writing courses regardless of the instructor's technical expertise.

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

"In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have engaged in 'uncreative writing'. Examining a wide rage of texts and techniques, including the use of Internet searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices adopted by writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol. Yet, more than just a reconfiguration of texts, uncreative writing can also be suffused with emotion and offer new ways of thinking about identity, tha making of meaning, and the ethos of our time."--Publisher.

Online media is and will continue to be at the forefront of entertainment; this book introduces readers to this new world and helps them create good content for it. It is a compact, practical guide for those who want to explore scriptwriting for the digital age while also learning essential skills and techniques central to new media writing. Scriptwriting 2.0 contains advice on writing both short- and long-form webisodes as part of a series, as well as standalone pieces. It then goes beyond the writing process to discuss revising, production, promotion and copyright. It is written in a friendly, readable and jargon-free style and includes real-world examples from successful series and a sample script. Readers can access full episodes of the two series discussed at length as well as samples from several other web series.

Addresses how digital forms of personal writing can be most effectively used by teachers, students, and other community members. At a time when Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Instagram, and other social media dominate our interactions with one another and with our world, the teaching of writing also necessarily involves the employment of multimodal approaches, visual literacies, and online learning. Given this new digital landscape, how do we most effectively teach and create various forms of “personal writing” within our rhetoric and composition classes, our creative writing classes, and our community groups? Contributors to Getting Personal offer their thoughts about some of the positives and negatives of teaching and using personal writing within digital contexts. They also reveal intriguing teaching activities that they have designed to engage their students and other writers. In addition, they share some of the innovative responses they have received to these assignments. Getting Personal is about finding ways to teach and use personal writing in the digital age that can truly empower writing teachers, writing students, as well as other community members. “Getting Personal offers an engaging, comprehensive view of how and why instructors, in both creative and academic writing, can integrate contemporary writing and communication practices into their classrooms, assignments, and curricula.” — Jill Talbot, editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction “I am right now rethinking some of my assumptions about what it means to do and to teach personal writing—especially in digital environments. I’m also taken with the fact that while the chapters are clearly academic, they are also personal, and while several of them explicitly call the ‘false binary between the personal and the academic’ into question, my sense is that they themselves do so implicitly as well.” — Barry M. Maid, coauthor of The McGraw-Hill Guide: Writing for College, Writing for Life, Fourth Edition

An innovative, practical guide for middle and high school teachers, this book is packed with specific ways that technology can help serve the goals of effective writing instruction. It provides ready-to-implement strategies for teaching students to compose and edit written work electronically; conduct Internet inquiry; create blogs, websites, and podcasts; and use text messaging and Twitter productively. The book is grounded in state-of-the-art research on the writing process and the role of writing in content-area learning. Teacher-friendly features include vivid classroom examples, differentiation tips, links to online resources, and reproducible worksheets and forms. The large-size format facilitates photocopying.

This book takes a fresh look at what it means to learn and develop as a writer in response to concerns on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere in the world, about standards in writing. In this book, the authors seek answers to some perennial questions: Why does performance in writing tend to lag behind that in reading? Are the productive skills of speaking and writing more difficult because they require the learner to make something new? What does it mean to develop as a writer? This book provides the foundation for developing the teaching of writing. It does so by: Reviewing and comparing models of writing pedagogy from the last fifty years Discussing the notion of development in depth Developing a new theory and model for writing in the multimodal and digital age Its basic premise is that writing needs to be re-conceived as one crucial component of communication among other modes. Andrews and Smith argue that although existing theories have provided insights into the teaching and learning of writing, we need to bring such theories up to date in the digital and multimodal age. Developing Writers is designed for teachers, academics, researchers, curriculum designers, parents and others who are interested in writing development. It will also be intended for anyone who is interested in developing their own writing, and who wishes to understand the principles on which such development is based. Continue the conversation at www.developingwriters.org.

As the online world of creative writing teaching, learning, and collaborating grows in popularity and necessity, this book explores the challenges and unique benefits of teaching creative writing online. This collection highlights expert voices who have taught creative writing effectively in the online environment, to broaden the conversation regarding online education in the discipline, and to provide clarity for English and writing departments interested in expanding their offerings to include online creative writing courses but doing so in a way that serves students and the discipline appropriately. Interesting as it is useful, Theories and Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing Online offers a contribution to creative writing scholarship and begins a vibrant discussion specifically regarding effectiveness of online education in the discipline.