Module description
Across the course of your studies in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at King’s, you will produce a wide and varied range of writing, adapting flexibly to different disciplinary requirements and contexts. This writing-intensive module will provide preparatory skills in written communication that will support you in your multidisciplinary academic work throughout the degree and beyond, enabling you to develop as a confident and effective writer who can tailor your writing for a range of audiences. Throughout the term, in small-group writing workshops, you will write and reflect on formative short pieces and will receive tutor and peer feedback; you will then edit and redraft your writing to compile a summative portfolio.
Moreover, the module provides opportunity for you to engage in detail with an interdisciplinary topic in the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences, led by a tutor from the Liberal Arts core team with specialist expertise in this area. In lectures, which will be common to all groups, the convenor will set out key concepts, issues, and approaches relating to writing, language, and communication. In seminars grouped by theme, you will read primary and secondary material relating to the topic and, with close attention to language, structure, and form, will explore how the authors construct their written texts and communicate their ideas. In the writing workshops and independently, you will develop your own written pieces in close, critical, and creative relation to the content and form of the reading materials
Assessment details
Writing Portfolio (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
- To use writing as lens through which students will learn about an interdisciplinary topic in the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences (several themes will be offered as options, led by tutors with specialist expertise in these areas: these may change annually)
- To provide opportunity for students to improve their writing skills and develop as effective, confident, and creative academic writers
- To enable students to develop their abilities to adapt their writing flexibly to different contexts and audiences
Learning outcomes
At the end of the module, a successful student will be able to:
- Show understanding of primary and secondary material relating to a complex interdisciplinary topic and explain how knowledge and ideas within it are constructed and communicated
- Write clearly, confidently, and effectively in a range of genres, forms, and styles
- Construct a persuasive and well-evidenced critical argument
- Engage in a process of drafting, revising, and editing written material, in response to feedback and independently
- Structure and format an academic essay appropriately
- Create accurate and appropriate references and bibliographies
- Identify specific linguistic and stylistic features and conventions of academic and disciplinary discourses; reflect on and develop strategies for their own use of these in their current subjects of study outside this module
Teaching pattern
Lectures and one-hour seminars. There will also be 6 two-hour workshops.
Suggested reading list
Bryan Greetham, How to Write Better Essays, 3rd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Stephen Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (London: Allen Lane, 2014)
David Crystal, The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language (London: Penguin, 2002)