Becoming a Great Essayist

Overview

Master the art of personal and persuasive essay writing with guidance from an award-winning author and professor.

Course No. 2521

This 24-lecture course will transform your ability to craft compelling essays by teaching you how to:

• Develop your unique writer’s voice and perspective

• Employ classical rhetorical techniques (ethos, pathos, logos)

• Structure different types of essays (memoir, lyric, polemical, etc.)

• Use vivid imagery and effective storytelling

• Polish your work from first draft to final revision

Whether you want to write personal reflections, persuasive arguments, or creative nonfiction, these lessons provide the tools to express yourself with clarity and impact.

Video Lectures

1. Steal, Adopt, Adapt: Where Essays Begin (34 min)

2. Memory Maps and Your Essay’s Direction (29 min)

3. Secrets, Confession, and a Writer’s Voice (29 min)

4. The Skeptical Essayist: Conflicting Views (30 min)

• The Reasonable Essayist: Artistic Proofs (31 min)

6. The Unreasonable Essayist: Strategic Irony (31 min)

7. The Empathetic Essayist: Evoking Emotion (30 min)

8. When an Essayist’s Feelings Face Facts (30 min)

• Unabashedly Me: The First-Person Essay (31 min)

10. Essayists as Poets: Tapping into Imagery (30 min)

11. The Visual Essay: Words + Pictures (31 min)

12. Writing Inch by Inch: From Draft to Polish (30 min)

13. Short Forms: Microessays and Prose Poems (30 min)

14. The Memoir Essay (31 min)

15. Lyric Essays: Writing That Sings (29 min)

• The Epistolary Essay: Letters to the World (31 min)

17. Portrait Essays: People in Words (32 min)

18. The Essayist as Public Intellectual (33 min)

19. Polemical Essays: One-Sided Arguments (31 min)

20. Historical Essays: Past as Present (32 min)

21. Humor Essays (31 min)

22. Nature Essays (33 min)

23. Food Essays: My Grandmother’s Recipe Box (32 min)

24. Sharing Your Essays: From Blog to Book (34 min)