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Berkeley Global
This hands-on, collaboration-driven course is designed to help writers strengthen the core skills that make academic prose work. You’ll build a strong foundation in organization, tone, style, and genre conventions while practicing how to adapt your writing for different audiences and academic contexts. You’ll perfect your drafting process and zoom in on what really matters at the sentence and paragraph level: clarity, flow, precision, and purposeful word choice. Through structured workshops and guided peer review, you’ll learn how to give and receive feedback thoughtfully, sharpening both your editorial eye and your creative instincts. Regular writing assignments, revision exercises, and instructor feedback will help you turn critique into momentum and revision into confidence. You’ll leave with stronger academic prose, practical revision strategies, and the confidence to tackle new writing challenges with clarity and control.
Course Outline
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Course Objectives
- Understand the writing process
- Critique writing effectively and appropriately
- Identify characteristics of effective prose, including audience, purpose and tone
- Develop an individual voice
- Choose an effective structure for a piece of writing
- Revise writing based on self-editing and comments from others
- Express ideas with greater assurance and precision
- Understand and use coherent syntax and style
- Identify and correct common grammatical errors
What You Learn
- Purpose, audience and the writing process
- The sentence as a building block
- The paragraph as a building block
- Putting the building blocks together to develop structure
- Choosing the right words for tone and voice
- Using the right words for details, metaphor and points of view
- Revision, including content, organization and word choice
- Revision of punctuation, spelling, grammar and formatting
- How to critique others’ work and accept criticism as feedback
How You Learn
- Discussion forums
- Journal assignments
- Practice exercises
- Short essay and revision
- Final project revision
Is This Course for Me?
This course is designed for those wishing to hone their skills for any writing need.
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Sections
Spring 2026 enrollment opens on October 20!
