Università Roma Tre

The course is characterized by a series of online activities of analysis, argumentation, conception and evaluation of written educational text such as scientific papers and pubblications, texts of didactic planning, especially in relation to preschool and primary school. The main contents of the course are the following: writing didactic material in different formal and informal disciplinary and educational contexts; the analysis of writing text in education; the lexicon of educational communication; the teaching and communication of scientific and cultural content in schools and museums.

Poce, Antonella (2020) (a cura di). Lo studio del canone nella cultura occidentale e la valutazione del pensiero critico-The study of the western culture canon and critical thinking assessment. Napoli, ESI, ISBN 978-88-495-4120-5.
Poce, Antonella (2015). Tecnologia critica, Creatività e Didattica della Scienza. Milano: FrancoAngeli

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)

The course is divided into the following teaching units (called "chapters"):
1) Chapter 1 - Creative writing, gathering Ideas
2) Chapter 2 - The plot, history, organizing ideas
3) Chapter 3 - The narrator, the voice, who tells the story
4) Chapter 4 - The beginning, the departure, the origin
5) Chapter 5 - The structure of the history and the construction of the characters
6) Chapter 6 - The ending, a cohesive structure, writing and rewriting a story

Mandatory readings:
Gotham Writers' Workshop. (2006) Lezioni di scrittura creativa, Un manuale di tecnica ed esercizi della più grande scuola di formazione americana. Audino.

Please note that the mandatory readings must be studied entirely unless otherwise indicated. The slides discussed in class and related to the main topics of the course will be available on the e-learning platform.

Further readings:
Seger, L., Carrington, S., & Tarquini, D. (1997). Come scrivere una grande sceneggiatura. Audino.
Forster, E. M., & Pavolini, C. (1968). Aspetti del romanzo. Alberto Mondadori.
Chatman, S. (2010). Storia e discorso. La struttura narrativa nel romanzo e nel film (Vol. 143). Il Saggiatore.
Genette, G. (1976). Metonimia en Prousta. id. Figure III. Discorso del racconto.

Please note that the further readings are not mandatory. However, it is advisable for both attending students and non-attending students to undertake the study of these didactic materials.