How "Intense" are the Writing-Intensive Courses?

SmithieandProud
Wed, 25 May 2011 19:07:17 +0000

It can vary a lot. But basically in a writing intensive course you’re probably going to be writing more frequent, but also shorter papers than in a non-writing intensive course. Also, the professor is generally does a lot more hand holding for the WI courses, because they’re aimed at first years. They’re not going to assume you know how to write a college paper or even how to take a college class, so they make some allowances for your inexperience.

Keep in mind too that you’re not always doing straight papers in WI classes. I took Reading and Writing Short Poems. Every week we studied a different poet with a different poetic style. The class met on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every Tuesday we had to turn in a short analysis (one page) of the poem we were reading that week, and then every Thursday we had to turn in an original poem written in that week’s assigned style. We had to submit two poetry portfolios during the semester of what we considered our best work and we were largely graded on that (both the quality of our poems and what poems we chose). We also had to attend and then write about two of the regular poetry readings held by the Poetry Center.

I frankly thought this was going to be a breeze, but turning out a high level analysis in one short page and a high quality poem every week was actually pretty challenging and much more work than I had expected. And you did not get points just for imitating the style of the week. You needed to actually write a good poem.