creative writing baylor

Baylor Graduate Writing Center

Helping Grad Students Become Better Writers

End-of-Semester Creative Habits for Writers

By Dr. Kristin Huggins, Consultant

Listen, I get it. May rolls around, and you are exhausted with a capital “E.” The end of the semester is anything but easy for students and professors alike to traverse. Between finals, term papers, capstone projects, and applications to the next program, next fellowship, or next career, you have very little mental space to consider continuing a sustainable writing routine through the last day of the semester. Despite the insanity of the end-of-term season, a glimmer of hope remains: your everyday routine will be disrupted.

“Exactly – I have too much to do in too little time, Kristin!”

Hear me out. During finals, you no longer have daily classes to attend. Your to-do list that has accumulated over four months is now being whittled down slowly but surely with every completed paper and submitted final exam. Suddenly, you find yourself outside your regular routine. This is referred to as positive disruption. Whether we consciously recognize this disruption or not, our brains certainly do. Creativity thrives on taking risks, not settling into complacency. After all, if you do the same thing you’ve always done, you’ll get the same results, n’est ce pas ?

In his book Yes to the Mess , organizational behavior researcher Frank Barrett speaks to this phenomenon . He observes that dislodging routines allows people to pay attention in ways that they weren’t able to before. Our synchronized calendars and Pomodoro timers for productivity power hours unwittingly stifle the creative process into stagnancy. Seasons of change (such as the end-of-term) provide the ideal setting for new innovative thinking, critical self-reflection, and breaking bad habits established during periods of routine.

Positive disruption can be highly productive for writers of all ilk. Arguably, this very deviation from “normal” provides you – dear writer – with the ideal space to reflect, explore, and plan for the new year ahead. As you prepare for the Great Closing of your Spring 2023 term, I highly encourage you to consider trying the writing practices provided below. You will not find word sprints, word count goals, or drafting ideas here. Instead, these end-of-term practices are more abstract in nature and are meant to help you lean into this idea of positive disruption while preparing for the summer break and the fall semester that will be here before you know it.

Reflection: Take time to look back and consider your writing accomplishments from the last four months. For those who equate productivity with a quantifiable measurement of assessment, you can look at the overall page count or word count written for the spring semester. For those who prefer a more holistic perspective, consider which papers meant the most to you and your work. Ask yourself the following:

• Which papers presented the most significant challenge? How did you face this challenge and overcome it? 
• What was your biggest writing takeaway (or “aha” moment) this semester? 
• Did you learn new techniques for drafting, revising, crafting, communicating, or emoting? 
• Now that you’ve reached the end, would you do anything differently with your writing? Why or why not?
• Most importantly, how do you feel about your writing abilities as of now? Compare this to how you felt at the beginning of the semester.

Creative Brainstorming: Many of us have kernels of ideas that collect dust in the recesses of our minds. These ideas can be stifled by the mundane daily grind, giving way to deadlines of the semester. Now that you have three weeks of reprieve, what would it look like to storyboard some of these ideas?

For example, I’ve been interested in developing my professional website for several months but haven’t had the mental space or energy to brainstorm copy for web pages. While this project wouldn’t require the same skillset as a journal article, creating online copy would still stretch my writing abilities in a way that I usually wouldn’t experience. Now that my responsibilities are winding down as I finish grading term papers and final exams, I can finally carve out that brainstorming space without guilt or pressure.

Perhaps you are interested in a similar non-academic project. Or perhaps you have an idea for new research that requires brainstorming through journaling or storyboarding. Permit yourself to explore these kernels without the pressure of developing a fully-fledged project. 

Goal-Mapping, and Identifying the Highs and Lows of Next Season: Look ahead to your upcoming summer and fall semester. What obligations/responsibilities will you be juggling? What projects are you already aware of that will require your attention? Before you create goals, map out the semester as best you can with a calendar so you can clearly see your semester’s mountains and valleys (i.e., weeks of high stress and low stress). This will help you calculate appropriate goals for your writing.

Next, prioritize writing projects. Which items have to be completed by next semester? Which items directly impact your ability to graduate, receive funding, or be considered for a new position? Those automatically must be placed as top priority!

Everyone’s goal map will look different depending on personal and professional circumstances. Give yourself grace and develop attainable goals that are relevant and exciting!

The end of a term will always be a whirlwind of activity. I want to encourage you – dear reader – to take advantage of the disruption to your regular schedule. Give yourself space to consider how much you’ve accomplished with your writing this semester, explore new creative ideas, and prepare yourself for the season ahead. 

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Professional writing and rhetoric major builds versatile, creative writers

By Julianne Fullerton | Reporter

Housed in Baylor’s English department , professional writing and rhetoric (PWR) is a small but mighty major of 59 students that prepares them to learn the versatility of writing and how to apply it in their professional lives .

Dr. Sara Dye, lecturer in English, defined rhetoric as the “art, discipline and craft of communicating effectively.” Within the major, she said students learn how to utilize rhetoric in practical ways.

“If you think about what you encounter on a day-to-day basis, everything is rhetorical,” Dye said. “One of the things that I think we do in the professional writing and rhetoric major is emphasize that we are surrounded by rhetoric and that being aware of all of the ways in which people are communicating with us and we are communicating with other people … can help us be more effective and ethical communicators.”

Dye said upon graduation, students with PWR degrees go on to do “anything and everything.”

“Everyone needs writers; everyone needs people who can communicate clearly and effectively and efficiently,” Dye said. “There are seemingly endless career options for people who have writing degrees. I think that a PWR degree sets you up to really do just about anything, because you will write no matter what you do for a career.”

Dye said she wishes all students knew exactly how much writing they’re going to do in their futures. Regardless of their field, Dye said employers always look for strong written and verbal communication skills.

“PWR as a major can prepare you to excel in almost any, if not all, possible career paths, because what you do as a writer is you think about, ‘How do I accomplish whatever purpose I have in front of me?'” Dye said. “One thing that we are doing is developing the critical thinking and writing skills that enable you to walk into a variety of contexts, a variety of disciplines, a variety of careers and be able to communicate effectively in them.”

Although he didn’t know what he wanted to do coming out of high school, Dallas sophomore Luke Babler said he has learned just how “pervasive” writing is. He said he even calls writing a “cultural thermometer,” because it gives insight into a person.

“Math, it’s humans defining concepts that are outside of ourselves, but writing is inherently from within,” Babler said. “The single best way to tell anything about anyone is how they write, which I think is fascinating.”

Through PWR, Babler said he has found a new interest in wanting to work collaboratively.

“What these classes have taught me the most is how much I like to work with people,” Babler said. “There’s a kind of misconception that writing is done by the starving artist, a loner type, and that’s just simply not true.”

Babler said he has confidence that he will be able to succeed despite living in a constantly shifting technological era.

“Truly, if you know how to be a good communicator, then there’s very little that you cannot figure out,” Babler said. “In these PWR classes, I may not know exactly what I want to do yet, but I do know that whatever I’m going to do, I’m going to be able to adapt to it.”

Kennesaw, Ga., senior Elle Jansick said she originally came to Baylor to pursue interior design, with PWR as her secondary major. However, soon after, she decided to fully pursue PWR.

“I never thought that I was going to pursue writing professionally; I thought it was just always like a hobby,” Jansick said. “Once I found out about the program, it really opened my eyes to how versatile the program is, and I was really excited to get to jump in.”

Jansick said her motivation to write stems from how she “unapologetically” believes in storytelling.

“I think that the more time that I spend in creative circles and creative careers and with our peers and cohort, I think that I know that I was put on this Earth to help tell stories,” Jansick said. “And I don’t think that’s always going to be on pen and paper. I think sometimes it’s going to be through art mediums.”

Jansick said she considers her PWR major to be the “best choice” she has made. Now that she is doing an internship with Magnolia , she said she is able to combine her passions and skills to create visual storytelling.

“As far as writing goes, it works in because we’re visually storytelling, and so that always starts with an idea,” Jansick said. “It starts with writing. It starts with drafting out a concept. Getting to see that aspect translate into something that I’m doing — which is much more tactical — but know that it all goes back to storytelling has been really cool.”

As for her future career plans, Jansick said she would love to continue with Magnolia and find a position on their visual display merchandising team. In addition, she said she would love to freelance write.

“For me, everything starts with words,” Jansick said. “Before I sketch, I write it out. I think that creating a visual element for people can go in tandem with a well-written piece, and I think getting to be on both sides of that coin is really, really cool.”

Jansick said she encourages all students to add a PWR class to their course schedule at Baylor.

“I think that if you have the ability and you want to work in any kind of creative field or any field where you’re going to tell stories, and you can add this, it’s the best asset you can do,” Jansick said.

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‘The program of no’: Creative writing program faces lecturer shortages

Two creative writing lecturers requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation. Pseudonyms and gender neutral pronouns were used to protect sources’ identities and improve readability.

Rose Whitmore, a former Jones lecturer, was one of Kathaleen Mallard’s ’25 favorite teachers and mentors. She received the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize — the same year she was let go. When another student asked her to be their advisor that year, Whitmore had to decline.

“I advised her for the rest of that year and then she had to go find somebody, and I think that was a bummer for her,” Whitmore said. 

Whitmore’s dismissal was necessitated by a four-year cap on lectureships, implemented by the creative writing program last year, which meant that those hired after the cap would be terminated at the end of their four years. But despite the policy, Stanford’s creative writing program — which claims to be “one of the best-known in the country” — continues to struggle to meet student demand, with high-volume waitlists for capped workshop classes.

For some students and lecturers, this tension between the program’s hiring limits and student demand means that creative writing students are not receiving the resources they need.

“Students are having a harder time getting into the classes,” said Charlie, a lecturer who requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation. “That’s why we’re disappointed at the faculty’s decision to reduce the number of lectureships — we feel like it’s wrong and it’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing, considering the demand.”

This academic year is the first that current Stegner fellows, from whom Jones lectureships are usually hired, are not being offered the opportunity to apply for the lectureship. In an email obtained by The Daily, Nicholas Jenkins, the co-director of the creative writing program, and Elizabeth Tallent, the former co-director of the program, wrote that the program lacked the funds to support new positions. Following advocacy to increase compensation to allow lecturers to afford Bay Area rent, the program recently increased salaries for Jones lectures.

Some students who face limited resources and teaching staff say they are being discouraged from the program. 

Natalie Rodriguez ’25, who said she applied to Stanford because of its creative writing program, said that despite being a declared English major, there has not been a quarter where she has not been stressed about enrollment. 

During her frosh winter, Rodriguez said she struggled to get into ENGLISH 90: “Fiction Writing” and eventually got off the waitlist after classes had already started. She considered herself lucky — if she had not gotten into the class, she said she likely would have been turned off by the program and probably would not have become an English major with a concentration in creative writing.

“That is the whole reason that I wanted to come here and it probably would have been incredibly stressful to have to figure out a whole plan and to feel like I had been lied to,” she said.

Even students who brave the enrollment process say the challenges are making them hesitant about pursuing a creative writing career.

Mallard said she can feel a sense of discouragement in the classroom from seeing lecturers get let go and experiencing the difficulty of getting into classes, which both make it seem like Stanford does not think creative writing is a “valid pathway.”  

According to Mallard, Whitmore is “one of the best short story writers [in the] nation.”

“If she was let go, what hope do the rest of us have for finding a job in creative writing?” Mallard asked. 

Sam, a lecturer who requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation, wrote that they found it strange that Stanford does not have the funds for additional creative writing classes when other departments and classes, like engineering, require more expensive resources. If there was a lack of instructors in the computer science department, they wrote, Stanford would immediately address the issue. 

Hiring caps mean that creative writing instructors also often have to turn down students looking for advisors.

Natalie Rodriguez ’25, who applied for an honors in the arts, said she reached out to several lecturers to advise her creative writing project. But none had the capacity to help her, because they were at capacity for the number of other students who had asked to do independent work. Eventually, Rodriguez found someone in a different department to advise her. 

Sam wrote that since the passing of the last program director, Eavan Boland, the new co-directors have implemented a policy of two independent studies students per year, per lecturer. Though many lecturers, like Charlie, say they take this maximum amount of two independent studies students per year, they are unable to fully meet student demand.

Capped workshops, which Rodriguez said are some of the program’s most popular and demanded classes, are also affected by teaching staff shortages. The most popular introductory creative writing classes, ENGLISH 9CE: “Creative Expression in Writing,” ENGLISH 90: “Fiction Writing” and ENGLISH 91: “Creative Nonfiction” are all workshops. 

“It’s important that workshops are kept to a class of 15 students, so that each student’s work gets the attention it deserves,” Sam wrote. “Most introductory courses have waitlists of 10 students or more.”

Whitmore said she used to receive many emails from students, especially from seniors who really needed to take a specific class to fulfill their minor. She would occasionally take more students than the cap, but such a decision is up to the discretion of each particular lecturer. 

“If there’s too many students in the class, people just don’t get the same experience,” Whitmore said. “Creative writing classes should be small because it’s an intimate excavator process and it’s meant to be.”

Workshops typically begin with a few weeks dedicated to studying the works of other authors, before students take turns sharing their personal work. Class sessions are then spent providing feedback to individual students — Rodriguez said these are her favorite classes to be in because she enjoys reading her classmates’ work and getting feedback from them and lecturers.

Since the introduction of enrollment groups, though, Sam wrote the composition of their introductory creative writing classes has been affected, with more seniors and juniors than before. “Of course we want seniors and juniors in our classes, but we’d especially like for freshmen and sophomores to have access to these introductory classes,” they wrote. 

“This is a failure of vision and attention at all levels of upper administration at Stanford. If I was a parent of a Stanford student who could not take a Creative Writing class, I would be astonished and angry,” Sam wrote.

Mallard said this was a huge problem for creative writing students, because it is hard to get into the classes they need. She said that it feels like there are more creative writing minors and English majors with a creative writing concentration now, “but they’re not hiring any new lecturers and a lot of really, really famous lecturers, like famous writers, are let go.” 

Sam wrote that when the creative writing program was under former director Eavan Boland, the culture and priority of the program was centered around the students. However, since her passing in 2020, the leadership and direction of the program has changed. Sam wrote that critical needs are not addressed, even when expressed by lecturers and students.

“Every email from our directors detail all the things that can’t be done. It’s become the Program of No. The culture and morale that was built by Eavan in partnership with the Jones lecturers and generations of undergraduates is falling apart in front of our eyes,” Sam wrote. 

In an email to The Daily, Gabriella Safran, senior associate dean of humanities and arts, wrote that she and the faculty in the program were aware of the high demand for creative writing classes, and that she could not speak to personnel and hiring issues. 

“We hope to provide more opportunities for students in the future once the restructuring of the program is complete,” she wrote. 

According to Charlie, under the co-directorship of Jenkins and Tallent, a process to restructure the creative writing program began with the formation of a working group comprised of creative writing faculty members. There was no Jones lecturer representation in the group. 

“I think if Stanford wants to claim that they have a great creative writing program, they need to offer the same funding and the same support that they offer to other programs,” said Rodriguez.

Mallard said she recently attended a poetry reading held by a Stegner Fellow. It was a packed event, which surprised her.

“So I think the problem isn’t with engagement or the lack of people who are passionate about creative writing … I think there are lots of students who want to make creative writing their livelihood after college,” she said. “It’s like, truthfully, Stanford is just, ignoring the students and what they want.”

Judy N. Liu '26 is the Academics desk editor for News and staff writer at The Daily.

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• Israel-Hamas War

My Writing Students Were Arrested at Columbia. Their Voices Have Never Been More Essential

O n April 30, 56 years after Columbia sent the police in to arrest student protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall in protest of the Vietnam War—protests the school loves to promote—I was walking my 12-year-old daughter home after her choir performance. We had gone an extra stop on the subway because the stop at 116th, Columbia’s stop, was closed. Instead, we had to walk back to our apartment from the 125th stop. When we got within sight of Columbia, a line of dozens of police blocked our path. I asked them to let us through; I pointed to our apartment building and said we lived there. As a Columbia professor, I live in Columbia housing.

“I have my orders,” the cop in charge said.

“I live right there,” I said. “It’s my daughter’s bedtime.”

“I have my orders,” he said again.

“I’m just trying to get home,” I said.

We were forced to walk back the way we came from and circle around from another block. Luckily, our building has an entrance through the bodega in the basement. This is how I took my daughter up to her room and sent her to bed.

Read More: Columbia's Relationship With Student Protesters Has Long Been Fraught

A week earlier, I had brought some food for the students camping out on Columbia’s West Lawn and had met with similar resistance. Security guards asked whether I was really faculty; I had already swiped my faculty badge that should have confirmed my identity. They asked to take my badge, then they said I hadn’t swiped it, which I had, two seconds earlier, as they watched. They said their professors had never brought food to them before. I didn’t know what to say to this—“I’m sorry that your professors never brought you food?” They called someone and told them the number on my badge. Finally, they were forced to let me through. They said again that their professors had never brought them food. “OK,” I said, and walked into campus. I reported their behavior and never received a reply.

On April 30, after I had got my daughter to bed, my partner and I took the dog down to pee. We watched the protesters call, “Shame!” as the police went in and out of the blockade that stretched 10 blocks around campus. Earlier that day, we had seen police collecting barricades—it seemed like there would be a bit of peace. As soon as it got dark, they must have used those barricades and more to block off the 10 blocks. There were reports on campus that journalists were not allowed out of Pulitzer Hall, including Columbia’s own student journalists and the dean of the School of Journalism, under threat of arrest. Faculty and students who did not live on campus had been forbidden access to campus in the morning. There was no one around to witness. My partner and I had to use social media to see the hundreds of police in full riot gear, guns out, infiltrate Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where protesters had holed up , mirroring the 1968 protests that had occupied the same building.

In the next few days, I was in meeting after meeting. Internally, we were told that the arrests had been peaceful and careful, with no student injuries. The same thing was repeated by Mayor Adams and CNN . Meanwhile, president Minouche Shafik had violated faculty governance and the university bylaws that she consult the executive committee before calling police onto campus. (The committee voted unanimously against police intervention .)

Read More: Columbia Cancels Main Commencement Following Weeks of Pro-Palestinian Protests

Then, Saturday morning, I got an email from a couple of writing students that they had been released from jail. I hadn’t heard that any of our students had been involved. They told me they hadn’t gotten food or water, or even their meds, for 24 hours. They had watched their friends bleed, kicked in the face by police. They said they had been careful not to damage university property. At least one cop busted into a locked office and fired a gun , threatened by what my students called “unarmed students in pajamas.”

In the mainstream media, the story was very different. The vandalism was blamed on students. Police showed off one of Oxford Press’s Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction . (This series of books offers scholarly introductions that help students prepare for classes, not how-to pamphlets teaching them to do terrorism.)

“I feel like I’m being gaslit,” one of my students said.

I teach creative writing, and I am the author of a book about teaching creative writing and the origins of creative-writing programs in the early 20th century. The oldest MFA program in the country, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was funded by special-interest groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and, famously, the CIA, and was explicitly described by director Paul Engle as a tool to spread American values.

Read More: 'Why Are Police in Riot Gear?' Inside Columbia and City College's Darkest Night

The way we teach creative writing is essential because it shapes what kinds of narratives will be seen as valuable, pleasurable, and convincing. Today’s writing students will record how our current events become history. One of the strategies Columbia took with its police invasion was to block access of faculty, students, and press to the truth. It didn’t want any witnesses. It wanted to control the story.

For weeks, Columbia administration and the mainstream media has painted student protesters as violent and disruptive—and though there have been incidents of antisemitism, racism, and anti-Muslim hatred, including a chemical attack on pro-Palestine protesters , I visited the encampment multiple times and saw a place of joy, love, and community that included explicit teach-ins on antisemitism and explicit rules against any hateful language and action. Students of different faiths protected each other’s right to prayer. Meanwhile, wary of surveillance and the potential use of facial recognition to identify them, they covered their faces. Faculty have become afraid to use university email addresses to discuss ways to protect their students. At one point, the administration circulated documents they wanted students to sign, agreeing to self-identify their involvement and leave the encampment by a 2 p.m. deadline or face suspension or worse. In the end, student radio WKCR reported that even students who did leave the encampment were suspended.

In a recent statement in the Guardian and an oral history in New York Magazine , and through the remarkable coverage of WKCR, Columbia students have sought to take back the narrative. They have detailed the widespread support on campus for student protesters; the peaceful nature of the demonstrations; widespread student wishes to divest financially from Israel, cancel the Tel Aviv Global Center, and end Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University; and the administration’s lack of good faith in negotiations. As part of the Guardian statement, the student body says that multiple news outlets refused to print it. They emphasize their desire to tell their own story.

In a time of mass misinformation, writers who tell the truth and who are there to witness the truth firsthand are essential and must be protected. My students in Columbia’s writing program who have been arrested and face expulsion for wanting the university to disclose and divest, and the many other student protesters, represent the remarkable energy and skepticism of the younger generation who are committed not only to witnessing but participating in the making of a better world. Truth has power, but only if there are people around to tell the truth. We must protect their right to do so, whether or not the truth serves our beliefs. It is the next generation of writers who understand this best and are fighting for both their right and ours to be heard.

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College delegation presents at creative writing festival

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Clatsop Community College participated in the Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher Creative Writing Festival in Port Angeles, Washington, from April 25 to April 27.

Associated Student Government president and creative writing major Asher Finch, along with writing instructor Kama O'Connor, did a presentation at the event about the work that is put into Rain Magazine, the college's annual literary publication. Joining Finch and O'Connor, adjunct writing faculty Marianne Monson read from her novel, "The Opera Sisters."

The delegation participated in various conference activities, including academic panels, plenary talks and special events. Over the course of the three-day event, they also had discussions with English faculty from colleges across the Pacific Northwest, exploring potential partnerships and collaborations.

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Bring back the pleasure of reading in classrooms

Ruth Allen says the soul has been knocked out of learning English and maths. Plus letters from Amy Lewis and Mary Smith

I read your editorial in delighted agreement with much of its argument ( The Guardian view on English lessons: make classrooms more creative again, 2 May ). My particular experience is working with the youngest children as they begin learning to read. Since 2021, schools in England have been required to follow the highly prescriptive systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) scheme. The “fully decodable” books approved for SSP schemes must focus on the spelling pattern to be learned, usually at the expense of a good story or any literary merit. Right from the start of school, enjoyment of books is being squeezed out.

However, your contention that the curriculum model of little blocks of tightly controlled content is “more suited to science and maths” must be challenged. My other role is as a maths tutor to teenagers. I find that they have been rushed to learn ever more complicated formulas and procedures without time to investigate ideas, to make links between topics or to develop thinking skills.

Mathematics is a deeply creative subject. Advances are made by finding new ways of thinking rather than by applying known formulae. Just as with English, the current fact-heavy GCSE and A-level maths curriculums squeeze out the joy of learning. A general curriculum review is needed. The soul has been knocked out of the English curriculum, but mathematics has been just as badly served. Ruth Allen Nottingham

It was so cheering to read your call for the pleasure of reading to be restored to the classroom. We all get the joy of sharing a picture book with young children, looking at the pictures, laughing together, perhaps enjoying the rhyme as we talk the words off the page. But for many children, that simple joy of reading gets lost when they learn to read.

They have to work hard to sound words out, and the story can become dull and restricted by what phonic sounds they are able to recognise. Language is stripped down to its component parts, reading becomes a chore, and parents and children get trapped in a reading battle.

Many schools are shifting the tide on this, and classrooms and corridors are beginning to buzz with reading-friendly spaces, brilliant books are positioned to tempt and children are encouraged to chat about their reading choices. But it’s an uphill battle. Let’s support schools, parents and carers to get children back to a place of sharing a book because they really want to. The benefits to all are clear. Amy Lewis Head of Coram Beanstalk

I couldn’t agree more with your editorial. I have taught English at secondary level for almost 50 years. For the first 25 years or so, the text was king. We read, discussed, engaged, argued, talked about life, society, morality, emotion – literally everything writers write about. Then, gradually and insidiously, the assessment objectives and mark schemes usurped the text. Thinking and responding gave way to spotting. It became less important to discuss why Hamlet asks “To be or not to be?” and what that suggests about the human condition, and more important to identify the rhetorical device Shakespeare used.

Teachers became obliged to value what could be measured rather than continuing to teach what is valuable, and the subject became a shadow of its former self. Mary Smith Bearsted, Kent

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2023-2024 Academic Catalog

Prof. writing & rhetoric (pwr).

Surveys core theories of writing and rhetoric in a variety of professional genres and familiarizes students with the range of possible careers. Required of all PWR majors.

Emphasis on theories, principles, and practices of effective technical writing and writing in the sciences. Students will compose technical genres such as reports, proposals, memos, and documentation with an emphasis on usability, accessibility, data analysis, information design, ethics, writing style, and collaboration.

An advanced writing workshop that that focuses on the analysis and production of texts written for specific rhetorical situations and discourse communities. Emphasis on genre, persuasion, and rhetoric. Practice in various types of expository, narrative, persuasive, and academic writing.

Focuses on popular nonfiction addressed to a wider audience. Students will practice creative nonfiction research methods and compose genres such as travel writing, memoir, autobiography, biography, profiles, and history.

Examines histories, theories, and practices of literacy in relation to questions of ideology, education, schooling, identity, social class, technology, and/or composition.

Examines the ways women use language to persuade in both public and private spheres in both historical and contemporary periods, with special attention to both traditional rhetorical genres (speeches, letters, sermons, editorials) and nontraditional texts (quilts, recipe books, blogs).

Exploration of rhetoric, writing, literacy, and culture in relation to race and other related issues, such as class, identity, gender, politics, and culture.

Study and practice of professional writing in workplace contexts, with attention to audience adaptation, project management, collaboration, work with clients, professionalization, and style. Students will compose a range of workplace writings (i.e., letters, proposals, reports, web documents, design documents) and create application materials for career positions or graduate study. Culminates in a digital portfolio. Required of all PWR majors.

Theoretical issues and pedagogical methods for tutoring writing one-on-one. Examines how people best learn to write, how to talk with writers about their writing, and how one-on-one tutoring facilitates learning to write, including writing process theory, tutoring methods, revision and editing strategies, transfer, genre and disciplinary conventions, and working with special client populations.

Examines the role of writing and rhetoric in shaping, mobilizing, and changing the public’s thinking on contemporary controversial issues. Focus on both historical and contemporary debates.

Writing workshop centered on a particular topic. Student's practice writing genres that are related to the course theme. Topics may include food writing, travel writing, the teaching of writing, or other similar topics. Repeatable for a maximum of 6 credits with permission of department.

Undergraduate research undertaken with the supervision of a faculty member. May be taken for a maximum of 6 hours.

Students will learn and apply key concepts, theories, and methods used to produce scholarship in the field of rhetoric and writing. Students will complete a major research project using writing studies research methodologies, such as empirical, archival, case-study, ethnographic, digital, qualitative, quantitative, and text and discourse analysis.

Students use writing and related media to explore, analyze and advocate on issues of public concern with opportunities for students to create texts and campaigns.

A workshop course designed to develop skills in composing in multiple modes and media for different audiences, purposes, and situations. Students will analyze and compose a range of multimodal texts that integrate words, images, and sounds, such as digital stories, websites, video essays, audio compositions, scrapbooks, and posters.

An exploration of the editing and publishing profession, including acquisitions and list building and development of a marketable publishing project. Addresses the history and philosophy of publishing, an editor’s vocation, and current changes in the field.

A writing workshop that provides experience writing from and critically analyzing spiritual perspectives. Students compose in a range of genres (creeds, spiritual autobiographies, and analyses of religious texts) in order to explore spiritual questions, religious experiences, and rhetorical concerns.

Advanced workshop in writing, researching, and publishing creative nonfiction in popular media outlets including magazines, newspapers, blogs, and nonfiction books.

Close study of a topic in writing, rhetoric, literacy, or a related field. Topic announced each semester. Repeatable for a maximum of 6 credits with permission of department.

An internship to provide students in the PWR program supervised writing experience in a business or professional setting. Required of all PWR majors.

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Book News & Features

Ai is contentious among authors. so why are some feeding it their own writing.

Chloe Veltman

The vast majority of authors don't use artificial intelligence as part of their creative process — or at least won't admit to it.

Yet according to a recent poll from the writers' advocacy nonprofit The Authors Guild, 13% said they do use AI, for activities like brainstorming character ideas and creating outlines.

The technology is a vexed topic in the literary world. Many authors are concerned about the use of their copyrighted material in generative AI models. At the same time, some are actively using these technologies — even attempting to train AI models on their own works.

These experiments, though limited, are teaching their authors new things about creativity.

Best known as the author of technology and business-oriented non-fiction books like The Long Tail, lately Chris Anderson has been trying his hand at fiction. Anderson is working on his second novel, about drone warfare.

He says he wants to put generative AI technology to the test.

"I wanted to see whether in fact AI can do more than just help me organize my thoughts, but actually start injecting new thoughts," Anderson says.

Anderson says he fed parts of his first novel into an AI writing platform to help him write this new one. The system surprised him by moving his opening scene from a corporate meeting room to a karaoke bar.

Authors push back on the growing number of AI 'scam' books on Amazon

"And I was like, you know? That could work!" Anderson says. "I ended up writing the scene myself. But the idea was the AI's."

Anderson says he didn't use a single actual word the AI platform generated. The sentences were grammatically correct, he says, but fell way short in terms of replicating his writing style. Although he admits to being disappointed, Anderson says ultimately he's OK with having to do some of the heavy lifting himself: "Maybe that's just the universe telling me that writing actually involves the act of writing."

Training an AI model to imitate style

It's very hard for off-the-shelf AI models like GPT and Claude to emulate contemporary literary authors' styles.

The authors NPR talked with say that's because these models are predominantly trained on content scraped from the Internet like news articles, Wikipedia entries and how-to manuals — standard, non-literary prose.

But some authors, like Sasha Stiles , say they have been able to make these systems suit their stylistic needs.

"There are moments where I do ask my machine collaborator to write something and then I use what's come out verbatim," Stiles says.

The poet and AI researcher says she wanted to make the off-the-shelf AI models she'd been experimenting with for years more responsive to her own poetic voice.

So she started customizing them by inputting her finished poems, drafts, and research notes.

"All with the intention to sort of mentor a bespoke poetic alter ego," Stiles says.

She has collaborated with this bespoke poetic alter ego on a variety of projects, including Technelegy (2021), a volume of poetry published by Black Spring Press; and " Repetae: Again, Again ," a multimedia poem created last year for luxury fashion brand Gucci.

Stiles says working with her AI persona has led her to ask questions about whether what she's doing is in fact poetic, and where the line falls between the human and the machine.

read it again… pic.twitter.com/sAs2xhdufD — Sasha Stiles | AI alter ego Technelegy ✍️🤖 (@sashastiles) November 28, 2023

"It's been really a provocative thing to be able to use these tools to create poetry," she says.

Potential issues come with these experiments

These types of experiments are also provocative in another way. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger says she's not opposed to authors training AI models on their own writing.

"If you're using AI to create derivative works of your own work, that is completely acceptable," Rasenberger says.

Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission

But building an AI system that responds fluently to user prompts requires vast amounts of training data. So the foundational AI models that underpin most of these investigations in literary style may contain copyrighted works.

Rasenberger pointed to the recent wave of lawsuits brought by authors alleging AI companies trained their models on unauthorized copies of articles and books.

"If the output does in fact contain other people's works, that creates real ethical concerns," she says. "Because that you should be getting permission for."

Circumventing ethical problems while being creative

Award-winning speculative fiction writer Ken Liu says he wanted to circumvent these ethical problems, while at the same time creating new aesthetic possibilities using AI.

So the former software engineer and lawyer attempted to train an AI model solely on his own output. He says he fed all of his short stories and novels into the system — and nothing else.

Liu says he knew this approach was doomed to fail.

That's because the entire life's work of any single writer simply doesn't contain enough words to produce a viable so-called large language model.

"I don't care how prolific you are," Liu says. "It's just not going to work."

Liu's AI system built only on his own writing produced predictable results.

"It barely generated any phrases, even," Liu says. "A lot of it was just gibberish."

Yet for Liu, that was the point. He put this gibberish to work in a short story. 50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know , published in Uncanny Magazine in 2020, is a meditation on what it means to be human from the perspective of a machine.

"Dinoted concentration crusch the dead gods," is an example of one line in Liu's story generated by his custom-built AI model. "A man reached the torch for something darker perified it seemed the billboding," is another.

Liu continues to experiment with AI. He says the technology shows promise, but is still very limited. If anything, he says, his experiments have reaffirmed why human art matters.

"So what is the point of experimenting with AIs?" Liu says. "The point for me really is about pushing the boundaries of what is art."

Audio and digital stories edited by Meghan Collins Sullivan .

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R.O. Kwon Is Writing Into Desire

By Keziah Weir

All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.

“I’m so obsessed with every word, every comma of a novel, that it was initially hard for me to contemplate letting go,” R.O. Kwon says of the screen adaptation of her best-selling 2019 debut novel, The Incendiaries. “My first reaction for half a day was like, ‘Well, guess I’m just going to learn how to make TV shows.’” But publishing has brimmed with lessons in surrender for the writer. “I was just like, ‘Well, no, I've read exactly one script of my life. I’m not versed in this.’” She relinquished control to two filmmakers whose work she admires. A collaboration between screenwriter Lisa Randolph ( Jessica Jones , Prodigal Son ) and director Kogonada ( Columbus, Pachinko ) is now underway.

She’s found other outlets for her comma tinkering. In 2014, Kwon started writing Exhibit (Riverhead) , and over the intervening decade has polished it so it glitters like a garnet in firelight. “I want the prose to get to a place where I can pick it up at random, read two sentences and not want to change anything about those sentences.” In the novel, a Korean American photographer named Jin finds herself creatively blocked at the same time her husband’s longing to become a father diverges painfully from her own desire to remain childless. An injured ballerina named Lidija, whom she meets at a party, unleashes both an artistic and a sensual awakening.

Kwon, who lives in San Francisco (“the long-term plan is to be here until climate change chases us out”), says that Exhibit bloomed from her longtime appreciation of photography and its “complicated and fraught relationship to reality, and to hanging on to a little bit of time, a little bit of the past” along with a more recently discovered love of dance. While watching a San Francisco Ballet performance of Alexei Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy, “I had this full body experience while watching, where I thought the dancers’ bodies—like, the cells —were directly talking to my body.” Kwon took introductory photography and ballet classes in an attempt to capture the bodily sensation of creating both art forms.

Earlier this year, Kwon wrote an essay about why she hopes her parents won’t read the book, given its frank depictions of lust and queerness—subjects into which Kwon took an exploratory dip with the best-selling 2021 story anthology Kink, which she co-edited with Garth Greenwell. It comprises fiction that explores desire from such authors as Alexander Chee, Melissa Febos, Roxane Gay, and Chris Kraus. Kwon’s own story, “Safeword,” was first published by Playboy and centers on a man navigating his girlfriend’s newly disclosed submissive sexual desires with a joint visit to a dominatrix.

“One of the strongest antidotes to the deepest kinds of loneliness, the worst shame I have felt, has been the fellowship I have found in literature and other people’s art,” Kwon says. “That's a guiding principle for me in my work. I so badly want to meet other people’s loneliness and other people’s solitude and other people’s shame.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: Where did the book start for you?

R.O. Kwon: One of the first sparks for the book was that I was interested in what, as a woman, I feel allowed and encouraged to want, and what I feel pressured to hide my desire for. I wanted to have women on the page who want a great deal, to see what happens if they're given a space to run after what they desire. Ambition continues to feel like a really fraught thing for, I think especially, my woman artist friends and woman writer friends to even say out loud. Saying the words, "I am an ambitious woman" still feels really dangerous.

Jin, like the narrators in The Incendiaries and in your short story “Safe Word,” was raised Christian and lost their faith, which I know is something that you experienced too. But both of those narrators were white men. Of course, I understand that Jin is fictional, and that you are not Jin, but I am curious about the difference between writing a narrator who feels biographically, on paper, different or more similar to you.

With The Incendiaries, it wasn't as though I walked in telling myself, I'm going to write a book from the point of view of a white man. It was actually initially told from Phoebe, the Korean woman’s point of view, and that ended up changing. I believe very strongly in following the book's desires and needs, and not imposing what I think the book should be.

But with this book, I wanted very much to write from a Korean woman's point of view, and to not let the book morph again, in that way, if at all possible. In retrospect, I thought that maybe part of why that happened with The Incendiaries, it could have been some part of me was trying to protect myself a little. A lot of people seem to assume that Phoebe was a stand-in character for me, which was definitely a little wild because I was like, I haven't bombed an abortion clinic! That was definitely the most common question: How autobiographical was this book? And my goodness, well, I haven't done that.

By Bess Levin

By Kase Wickman

I wanted to let myself be much more unprotected in this book. Sex is at the center of this book. And being Korean, ex-Catholic, and ex-Christian, part of the journey of this book has involved some of the most overwhelming anxiety and panic that I've ever experienced in my life.

I'm sorry!

Part of me would just be watching myself and being like, you did this to yourself. Why? No one made you do this. No one made you write this very queer, kinky novel.

It's still true that every cell in my body seems to feel convinced that…honestly, a message I keep hearing is: You're going to be killed. It wasn't that long ago that a Korean woman could be divorced for talking too much. You could be divorced for—this one kills me, I flew into a day’s outrage about this—you could be divorced for moving during sex. And at the time, being divorced was a death sentence. I'm just not that far removed from when that was true. And my body's fully aware that giving any hint to the world that I've ever had sex is such a rule-breaking thing. I'm pretty sure I haven't even told my grandmother I’m queer. I just let her live her life in peace. She almost certainly thinks being queer is an illness. It's just not that uncommon. It's not just my grandmother's generation, at all.

Part of the deep anxiety about this has also come from the ways in which I write about sexuality and kink, especially Jin's sexuality, is that it can be misinterpreted as aligning exactly with some of the most harmful stereotypes about people who look like me. That we’re submissive, hypersexual, compliant, that we’re up for being mistreated. But I do believe that turning away from naming what I feel compelled to name, that itself brings its own harm.

I think a lot about something that my friend Garth Greenwell said. I'm paraphrasing, but he said something like, "I'm not writing for people who think I'm disgusting. I'm writing for people who already think I'm beautiful." Jin clearly has very conflicted feelings about her desires, and is working through those conflicted feelings. I hoped that this book would at least in part turn into or turn toward a celebration of our bodies, and a celebration of bodies who are told that we don't get to want what we want.

In talking about her lack of a desire to have a child, Jin says that she can't argue the urge into being, which felt like such a parallel to the surety or lack thereof about faith in God.

That was one obsession of the book, these different ways—with faith, with wanting children or not, with sexual desire, with appetites in general, including for food—that our bodies are so powerful. I haven't been able to—and I've tried—I can't argue myself into believing in a Christian God. Again, I can't argue myself into or out of sexual desire. I am fascinated by the ways in which I haven't been able to ever reason or argue myself out of who I seem to be and what I want and what I believe.

I have friends and loved ones who so desperately want kids. And I know how absolutely, with all my being, I've never had that desire. With Jin and her husband, she, even more adamantly than I do, doesn't want kids. I always said if my partner woke up one day realizing he definitely wants kids, then I've told him, we will work with that and figure something out. But for Jin, it's further along on the spectrum than I am. She's just like, "I can't imagine this." And so there's the profound heartbreak of what do you then do when your life becomes incompatible with someone you love very much?

There’s another love story of sorts—the ghost of a kisaeng starts speaking to Jin.

The kisaeng story, the bare bones of the double suicide, with someone who was going to marry her, that's very loosely based on a family story. It has been fascinating to me, in part, because some of the family stories I've heard most often, and I really haven't heard that many family stories, have to do with people blowing up their lives for love. This became especially personal to me when the conflict that Jin has with her parents, where they didn't want to, where they say, "If you don't have a marriage in the church then we won't come." My parents said that to me. I took a less hard-line position. I’m so not Christian. That said, I thought, if this matters so much to y’all, then all right, whatever. We can have a priest involved.

The kisaeng who plays this large role in my own family's mythology, her name hasn't survived. I plunged into research, which itself started feeling really restrictive, because I just became increasingly obsessed with needing the historical details to be exactly right. And at one point, what became very liberating was I read about Korean men in Korea looking through Korean history and anointing people of the past as queer ancestors, because of all the ways in which queer people are erased from history. That really liberated me. I was like, You know what? We're talking about a ghost, channeled through a shaman, and she can fly. I can make some things up.

One of my biggest pleasures in a book is finding a character from another one of the author’s books—and I got that in The Exhibit, with a visit from the world of The Incendiaries.

There's a part of me that almost believes that an ideal version of a book pre-exists me. And I feel less that I'm making anything up with fiction, and that I’m more working my way toward a book that's already there. Honestly, that feels more reassuring than...

That you're liberating a form rather than having to find it yourself.

That way it’s not the wide open vista of infinite choice, but instead working my way toward liberating, like a sculpture out of a rock. The world of The Incendiaries feels to me as though it almost exists. When I feel extra down about the world, I sometimes turn to quantum physics for consolation, the articles and books that are for lay people. I love reading that there are infinite versions of the world, and in ways that almost exceed language. In The Incendiaries, a world where those abortion clinics were bombed, that version of the world, it seems to exist to me. It still felt so vibrant, that it felt natural for the world of Exhibit to also belong there.

I'm most likely working toward either a trilogy or triptych, or a quartet, of books where they're very loosely connected. But where what happens in the past, in these past books, continues to exist in future books. I think Jin's photos—I mean, who knows, it's early days—I think Jin's photos will show up in the next book.

It sounds like you're already working on that third book.

I'm having more trouble really pulling myself into fiction than I've ever had. It's been really disorienting. It just remains such a central terror, that terror Jin feels in Exhibit , her fear that the photos have left. Because it does happen sometimes. Every now and then, there are artists who just don't ever write again, don't make their art again. I’m so afraid that the words have left. But I'm trying to be patient, and I've been storing up, and I've been collecting accounts of writers who fall into years of quiet, because I know my mind and body are at their best when I’m writing fiction every day. And currently I’m not able to, but I'm trying.

Below, Kwon shares some of the creative inspirations behind Exhibit.

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Baylor Scott & White could terminate BlueCross BlueShield contract

According to a press release, bcbs was notified by the hospital that bsw will terminate physician and hospital agreements on july 1, 2024 unless the agreements are modified.

BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) - BlueCross BlueShield of Texas gave notice about negotiations with Baylor Scott & White Health. According to a press release, BCBS was notified by the healthcare system that BSW will terminate physician and hospital agreements on July 1, 2024 unless the agreements are modified.

BCBS said if an agreement is not reached BSW doctors, hospitals, and facilities will no longer be in-network for its members.

BCBS said if an agreement is not reached doctors, hospitals, and other facilities will leave the following provider networks:

• Blue Choice PPOSM
• Blue EssentialsSM
• Blue PremierSM
• Blue Advantage HMOSM
• Blue Cross Medicare Advantage (PPO)SM
• Blue Cross Medicare Advantage (HMO)SM

Baylor Scott & White provided a statement to KBTX, you can read it in full below:

Baylor Scott & White Health is negotiating a new contract to cover care for patients with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas (BCBSTX) health insurance. Currently, patients with BCBSTX plans have in-network coverage with our providers and facilities, and we are working to reach a new agreement before July 1, 2024, to keep BCBSTX plan holders in-network. Our patients are our top priority, and we are working to minimize any potential disruptions.

For more information, please visit www.BSWHealth.com/BCBSTX

Copyright 2024 KBTX. All rights reserved.

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