Advanced Freelance Writing

EXTEND YOUR WRITING SKILLS

Improve your chances to sell your work

• Seek employment with publishers; or elsewhere as a freelance writer
• Sharpen your writing skills, under guidance from a professional, published writer, as your tutor and mentor.
• Learn different writing techniques, conduct research and interviews, and plan projects.

Freelance writing is a highly competitive field. Successful freelance writers not only have good writing skills, they have a ‘nose’ for a good story, a mastery of their chosen area of writing, the ability to write quickly and succinctly, good interpersonal skills, and a wide range of useful contacts.

While all these career-building skills are important, they obviously take time to develop. This course builds on skills and experience you might already have. It assumes that you have a solid understanding of writing. You may already have had something published. If you want to build on your past experience and skill though; this is exactly what this course is designed for.

There are 8 lessons in this course:

1. Introduction.
   • Writing Themes, Sentence Structure, Summary Skills, Theme Development (eg. Deductive, Inductive, Classic, Chronological, Descriptive, Analogy, Cause & Effect, Classification, Definition Analysis, Comparison & Contrast, Flashback etc)
2. Writing a Regular Column
   • Newsletters, News Columns, Criticism Journalism (eg Theatre Critics, Book Reviews, Film Reviews, etc)
3. Educational Writing
   • Interviewing Skills, Illustrating an article, Putting it all together
4. Scientific Writing
   • Technical Writing, Statistics
5. Writing a Biographical Story
   • Developing a draft plan, Research, Writing the final manuscript
6. Writing a News Article
   • Analysing a news article; writing and illustrating a sporting event
7. Fiction Writing
   • Category Writing; Mainstream Writing; Characteristics of good fiction (ie. A strong plot;. A hero or heroine; Obvious motivation; Plenty of action; A colourful background), Forming and developing an idea.
8. Other Writing
   • TV & Radio Scripts, Science Fiction, Conducting a Survey; Developing a Story.

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

Aims:

• Review basic writing skills and discuss theme development
• Develop skills in writing a regular magazine or newspaper column.
• Describe the key elements of educational writing.
• Describe the key elements of technical writing.
• Develop skills in interviewing and preparing a biographical story.
• Develop skills in writing news articles.
• Develop skills in writing fiction.
• Describe other writing styles including script writing.

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