Creative Writing Minor

Through writing we develop as thinkers—critical, analytic, and synthetic—as we actively absorb, engage, question, and participate in the world. Crafting and making our own choices about language, we become increasingly alert to how words both succeed and fail in work, politics, relationships and society. We learn that words are prismatic, reflect multiple meanings and experiences, not only our own but also those of others radically unlike us. And we discover ourselves by trying to put introspection as well as reflection into words.    

As students of words, we learn about a vast range of human possibilities, and we valorize a vast range of human experiences. In doing so we align, compare, and contrast ourselves with countless others who have inscribed human life in language through the centuries.

The Writing Minor at Yeshiva College recognizes that proficiency in writing will prove advantageous for any major, for any career, and for the career change most educated people make from time to time. The minor will help any student express himself in the present and prepare for any future, whether in graduate or professional school, as a professional writer, or during almost any other type of work. 

Learning Goals

The goals of the Creative Writing Minor are to enable each student who successfully completes it to:

• Develop into an effective, confident creative and/or expository writer, reviser, and editor;
• Develop a substantial repertoire of strategies for invention, writing, and revision;
• Apply interpretive skills to writing so that "reading" and "writing" will reinforce one another 
• Develop one or more voices and a sense of authorship;
• Write for various audiences in various genres (e.g., fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, creative nonfiction);
• Practice and appreciate writing as art, craft, rhetoric, and as application of ideas about writing; and
• Enhance his enjoyment of writing.