Università Roma Tre

The course will analyse the techniques and theory of creative writing and illustrate the basics of writing short stories and novels, film and television scripts, plays, radio programmes and cartoons. Students will be given the instruments that will enable them to approach writing through the knowledge and comprehension of the world of fiction and of the fundamental theories of story-telling and the acquisition of the specific skills required.
The course will help students develop their creative writing abilities, perfect their syntactic language skills and activate all the capacities required to write a complete text.
The writing workshop is set up as an organised and targeted open forum focused on: stimulating, perceiving and processing internal mental images.
The lessons will represent an opportunity to tackle the key issues of narration: character creation, plot structuring and avoiding the most frequent narrative traps. Practical exercises will help students design their own comprehensive narrative approach.

Different narrative forms will also be analysed in order to help students understand how to adapt them to different writing activities (from content creation for traditional media to developing contents for websites and social networks).

In particular, the course aims to develop students ' knowledge and skills associated with the following contents:

• Learn different creative writing forms and their peculiarities
• Analyse narrative structures (three-act structures, tales of travelling heroes…)
• Explore the ways of applying creative writing to different media
• Analyse all types of narrative mechanisms
• Destructure a creative text in order to highlight its strengths and weaknesses
• Use the appeal of creative texts for non-fiction
• Use narrative mechanisms to make non-fiction texts flow more easily
• Learn to single out and exploit the strengths of the idea underlying a text of fiction/non fiction
• Use the same elements in a text of fiction as in one of non-fiction (from news to fiction and from a biography to a biopic)

Beltramo M., M. T. Nesci, Dizionario di stile e scrittura, Zanichelli, Bologna.
Garavelli B.M., Prontuario di punteggiatura, Laterza: Bari, 2003.
Gotham Writers' Workshop, Lezioni di scrittura creativa, Un manuale di tecnica ed esercizi della più grande scuola di formazione americana, Dino Audino Editore.
Santambrogio M., Manuale di scrittura non creativa, Laterza, Bari, 2006.
Seger L., Come scrivere una grande sceneggiatura, Dino Audino Editore, Roma.
Serianni L., Leggere, scrivere, argomentare, Laterza, Bari, 2013.

I materiali didattici necessari allo svolgimento di esercitazioni individuali e in piccoli gruppi saranno distribuiti a lezione e sulla bacheca elettronica.

General objective of the course will be that of endowing students with those tools necessary to project and write teaching and learning materials in different disciplinary and educational settings, being them formal and informal.
Students will be asked to reflect on the lexicon and syntactical structures to be used for an effective teaching, according to the addressees’ profile, with specific reference both to teaching and learning and cultural and scientific communication in school and museum context. Students are asked as well to reflect on the level of difficulty of the texts proposed in order to transfer contents, on the choice of the kind of language used and to be used, and on the ways of representation of a certain content.
They will have, then, to work on the analysis of the writing techniques related to the disciplinary fields identified, in projecting and defining a methodology of work and in the draft of texts for teaching and learning, solving educational problems submitted to their attention. Meta-objectives will be the possibility to increase both literacy abilities, often lacking as regards grammar and syntaxes and writing argumentation skills, critical thinking skills and creativity.
To this aim the course is articulated in a main module (face to face and distance) and a creative writing lab where main tools for analysis and production of fiction texts (stories, novels and scripts) and non-fiction texts (press articles and short essays) will be explained.

Main course:
Cartesio, Discorso sul metodo (qualsiasi edizione, anche online).
Poce (a cura di), Tecnologia critica, Creatività e Didattica della Scienza, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2015, ISBN: 978-88-917-2533-2
Testi consigliati per approfondimento:
Garavelli B.M., Prontuario di punteggiatura, Laterza: Bari, 2003, ISBN 978-88-420-7027-6
Serianni L., Leggere, scrivere, argomentare, Laterza, Bari, 2013, ISBN 978-88-581-0663-1
Serianni L., L’ora di italiano. Scuola e materie umanistiche. Laterza, Bari, ISBN 978-88-420-5994-3
Santambrogio M., Manuale di scrittura non creativa, Laterza, Bari, 2006 ISBN 978-88-420-8640-6

Creative writing lab
Seger L., Come scrivere una grande sceneggiatura, Dino Audino Editore, Roma, ISBN: 978-88-7527-151-0
Beltramo M., M. T. Nesci, Dizionario di stile e scrittura, Zanichelli, Bologna, ISBN: 978-88-08-07477-5
A. Celotto, ll dott. Ciro Amendola, direttore della Gazzetta Ufficiale, Mondadori, 2014.