The Craft of Writing: Making Deliberate Choices
What this module asks
The Craft of Writing develops your ability to compose imaginative, discursive, persuasive and reflective texts with control and purpose. You must understand how choices of form, voice, structure, syntax, imagery and register create effects, and you must be able to justify those choices.
Concepts to master
- Form and genre: imaginative, discursive, persuasive and reflective writing each have distinct conventions and reader expectations.
- Voice and persona: the constructed speaker, whose attitudes and register may differ from your own.
- Structure: openings that orient or disorient, pacing, paragraphing, and endings that resonate or resolve.
- Syntax and rhythm: sentence length, fragments, cumulative sentences and punctuation as tools for emphasis.
- Imagery and figurative language: concrete detail and metaphor that do work rather than decorate.
- Register and diction: matching language to audience, purpose and persona.
Traps in questions
Prompts may specify an audience, a form, a stimulus or a reflective component. A frequent failure is ignoring the stipulated form and writing a short story when a discursive piece is required. Another is overusing figurative language until clarity collapses. Students also write a reflection that lists techniques without connecting them to purpose or to the stimulus, or they borrow a pre-prepared story that does not answer the question.
Rule of thumb
Before writing, state in one sentence: "My purpose is to make the reader feel or understand X, so I will use Y to achieve Z." Every stylistic choice should answer that sentence.
Worked example
If the stimulus is a single word such as "threshold", open with a concrete image of a doorway, build tension through short sentences, then shift to longer reflective sentences as the narrator's understanding changes. In the reflection, explain how the sentence-length shift mirrors that change in understanding.
Practice habit
Write a 150-word piece, then annotate three choices with their intended effects, and revise one choice to strengthen its effect.