Olvar Wood onLine: Courses

The Olvar Wood Fellowship Award is an annual award for emerging authors. Each year, four recipients are offered a fellowship. For more details about the award, visit the Fellowship Page.

Writing Your Exegesis Overview Prerequisites Content Feedback About Learning Online How to Enrol Cost: $(AU)395.00

Are you studying for your Honours, MA or Phd in Creative Writing? Struggling to find a form or focus for your exegesis? The exegesis workshop includes step-by-step guidance for writing your exegesis, from deciding on an research question, through conducting your research and putting together a punchy, engaging argument. The workshop includes individual guidance on resources, structure, research and style.

Prerequisites

You don't need to have any prior experience or knowledge to enrol in this course that you won't already have to have to gain entry into your postgraduate writing course, although you may find it helpful to have a play around in our free Sampler course, or in one of introductory online courses Playing with Prose or Playing With Poetryin order to familiarise yourself with Olvar Wood onLine (OWL).

You will need to be able to provide your course mentor with details about your university's exegetical requirements. Specifically: length, relationship to the creative work, or any other other content requirements.

Content

This course is comprised of 12 lessons, each of which is designed to help you conceptualise, research, and write your exegesis.

1. Introduction: What Is An Exegesis?
2. Project Management for Creative Writers
3. Designing Your Research Project
4. Methodology
5. Creative Writing Research - Part One
6. Creative Writing Research - Part Two
7. Critical Reading
8. Literature Review
9. Writing About Writing
10. Writing the Introduction
11. Writing the Conclusion
12. The Fiddly Bits: appendices, acknowledgments, abstracts, bibliographies

Feedback

There are several opportunities in each lesson for you to submit your writing for informal feedback from both other writers in the course, and the course tutors. Feedback from the course tutors on your posts to forums and so on will not be in-depth, but will be personal and timely. You will not receive feedback on all of your posts or comments in the course, though you can expect to receive frequent, personal comments most of the time.

There are three formal feedback opportunities during this course. These are opportunities for you to submit considered pieces of your own writing for feedback both from your peers in the course, and from the course mentor. This feedback will be in the form of written notes and will be focused on helping you identify the strengths and weaknesses in your writing, and on ways to move your writing forward. Feedback may include, where appropriate and relevant, advice about further reading, strategies for improving the work, potential markets for publication, etc.

Writing Task One: Due Week Four

• Your first submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of the first 5000 words of the body of your exegesis (not the introduction - we'll look at that last!)

Writing Task Two: Due Week Eight

• Your second submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of the second 5000 words of the body of your exegesis

Writing Task Three: Due Week Twelve

• Your third submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of the third 5000 words of the body of your exegesis, OR your introduction, OR your conclusion.

Feedback on your exegetical writing is provided by experienced postgraduate supervisors and examiners, all of whom have PhDs in Creative Writing and have supervised honours, masters and doctoral candidates through to completion.

About Learning Online

OWL’s online courses work by inviting you to engage with your tutor, and with other writers enrolled in the course through a range of interfaces, including chat rooms, discussion forums, wikis, and standard, content-based webpages.

Throughout the site, you’ll find there is instant help available – usually indicated by a ?, which you can click to get more information. If you still can’t find a solution, simply post a message in a discussion forum, or email your tutors.

Although the course is run online, we also ask you to work offline on your writing, using old-fashioned techniques like writing in a journal, stretching your imagination and reading.

To get the most out of this course, we recommend you set aside at least four hours for each lesson/week:

• One hour to read the online lesson material;
• One hour to think and dream and mess about with ideas;
• One hour for trying out the various writing techniques each lesson includes; and
• One hour for posting your writing, providing feedback or commentary on other writer’s work, participating in discussion forums and chats, and so on.

We recommend that you allocate a bit of extra time the first week to familiarise yourself with the online learning forum.

1. Every month for 12 months you will be given individually-tailored reading and writing assignments to complete. At the end of each month you will prepare a monthly package to submit, on which you will receive detailed feedback, including guidance and instruction for the next month's work.
2. Each month you will submit sections from your creative work to your peers, who will read your work and provide feedback to you by email. You will also provide feedback on their work: finetuning your editorial skills and techniques.
3. Every month a 'lesson' will be posted on the MDP space - this will generally include a discussion paper, links to related materials, opportunities for realtime (chat) and asynchronous (forum-style) discussion of the ideas in the lesson.
   
4. Throughout the year, you will be able to meet up with the other MDP group members for intensive writing days and discussions (these take place in Brisbane, at the State Library), and/or for private phone or online discussions of your work with your mentor.
   
5. (OPTIONAL) During the year, you will have the opportunity to participate in an intensive week-long retreat. The daily workshops during the retreat will be an opportunity to take time out from your otherwise busy life to focus on your writing, and gain the kind of feedback and support from both myself and the rest of the group that can only arise from spending a year writing, thinking, reading and talking together. Sharing the life of the mind and the imagination.

• A sample of your writing (up to 5,000 words);
• An outline of your proposed novel/book;
• A critical analysis/review of a piece of writing (up to 1000 words); and
• A statement outlining what you hope to achieve from undertaking the program.

• For more information, visit the MDP Page at Olvar Wood.