Pilot foundation course

We are halfway through our pilot foundation course, finally putting into practice our ideas and theories. And, it is such fun! We have seven intrepid guinea pigs who are testing the course, and the feedback has been wonderful.

We have already had three of the four workshops. Week 1 was all about prewriting tool and included exercises to help over writer’s block. Our guinea pigs tried out free writing, brainstorming and clustering (what we call mind mapping). Then, Week 2 was the PAP module – purpose, audience and planning. We looked at how to clarify your purpose, identify your purpose and plan your document. We experimented with two structures for planning documents: an outline (beginning, middle, end) and an argument (both sides of an issue).

This week, we got down to the nuts and bolts of writing: sentences and paragraphs, the building blocks of writing. We looked at the three most common sentence errors (sentence fragment, comma splice and run-on sentences), how to structure a paragraph using an outline, and the importance of transitional words and sentences to link sentences and paragraphs.

Our intention of this course was to have fun – learning as play. And, judging from the reaction of our participants, we seem to be succeeding. However, the litmas test will be next Tuesday, when we run our last module (Get Writing 2) and tackle common grammar and spelling words!