BA English Literature with Creative Writing

Year 1

(Award available for year: Certificate of Higher Educ)

Learning outcomes

On completion of the Foundational year of study, enrolees will have built the foundations of key subject-specific skills, namely:

• To write creatively. Evidence of this skill will take the principal form of two pieces of writing which students will submit over the course of the Semester Three module Foundations in Creative Writing. Both will be 3,000 and 4,000 words in length, or will take the form of a sequence of works in another genre (such as poetry or drama) that the module tutors deem equivalent to that range. In line with QAA Benchmark guidance, both of these submissions will also include acts of personal reflection which will be determined by module convenors or tutors but which will incorporate a critical discussion of the process of feedback and review.

• To write critically. Evidence of this skill will take the principal form of the units of coursework and examinations which students will complete in the course of the other core modules and the option or discovery modules they choose to pursue.

• This foundational portfolio of critical and creative work will also stand as emerging evidence of QAA Benchmark subject-specific skills in the capacity to process feedback and think in objective ways about their own writing.

• It will also stand as emerging evidence of the student’s growing knowledge of the contexts in which that writing sits: literary, cultural and personal; it will communicate an objective sense not only of the writing itself but its relationship to their own identity.

• It will also stand as emerging evidence of the student’s foundational knowledge of their own creative habits and judgements, deepening their knowledge of its relationship to longer traditions of literary work and intellectual thought.

Transferable (key) skills

As a result of the foundational year, then, the student will begin to display an emerging capacity to go on and progress to achieve the QAA Benchmark’s objective of enabling undergraduates at the point of graduation to “read as a writer.” The development of such close control over the possibilities and effects of the words we read and write is the central transferable skill of this degree. Levels Two and Three build on this foundational year and draw on the processes and assessment approaches that it introduces.

Assessment

Assessment of all English elements as set out above will be carried out in close consultation with the School’s universal 0-100 marking criteria, but will also be based on the pursuit of key learning outcomes such as the emerging capacity to use literary voice, idiom, idiolect, simile, metaphor, and other expressive devices; and their emerging capacity to produce clear, accurate, artistically coherent and technically sophisticated written work.