Introduction:
Ultimately your goal with any story is to make it so compelling that your reader gets all the way through it. That means, of course, structuring it coherently and giving it a beginning, middle, and end.
Learning objectives:
- Understanding how great writers structure stories
- Critiquing the structure of peers’ stories
- Applying lessons on structure to own work
Steps to completion:
Background:
- Read “The Things that Carried Him” and develop a paragraph by paragraph outline of it, summarizing each graf. Post in Module 8 with the tag “outline” by Oct. 24.
- Writing Tools Part III
- John McPhee: Beyond the picnic-table crisis
- Find a story from the Don van Natta list or elsewhere. Find an example of the advice offered by Clark or Blaine and write a short blog post explaining in Module 8 with the tag “structure advice” by Oct. 26.
Reflective:
- Class discussion Oct. 25: Discussing structure
- Class discussion Oct. 27: Peer discussion on structure
Exploratory
- Complete draft of news analysis due 11.9.
- Complete draft of pick-em due 11.11.
- Revise profile by 11.14