By Brian Jenkins
Online writing courses can build on and improve your writing skills. Formal courses can help professional writers as well as aspiring professional writers. Unfortunately, the average online writing course costs about $400. The good news is that there are numerous universities that provide free writing courses on the Web. Let's take a look at what's available.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
MIT provides many of its past courses online for free through OpenCourseWare. The Creative Spark, for example, was a course taught by MIT professor Karen Boiko in 2004. Other free courses in fiction and non-fiction writing are available at the MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies Department website. Go ahead and take one of these courses and tell your friends you've been accepted to MIT! They will definitely be impressed!
Here's a list of some free online writing courses provided by other schools around the country:
- Open University: Fiction writing courses, descriptive writing courses, and essay writing courses.
- University of Utah: Introduction to creative writing and an introduction to Shakespeare.
- Purdue University: Pattern and variation in poetry, proofreading your writing, and conquering the comma.
- Western Governors University: Rhetorical and critical writing, language and communications, and literature (parts I and II).
Wikiversity
Wikiversity offers free online courses and tutorials. The website features several different categories of writing courses, many of which focus on technical writing. It also provides an introduction to Web writing. And it is home to the #1 college football team in the nation! (No, not really.)
For a Fee Writing Courses
Forbes magazine has included writing classes.com, the online arm of Gotham Writers Workshops, in its "Best of the Web" list. Check out this website if you are interested in paying for formal courses. A lot of their classes are focused on creative writing, but they do offer writing classes in topics such as article writing, food, memoir, travel, business, and nonfiction. The school also offers private instruction, which is nice for those who benefit from one-on-one learning. Mediabistro and Writer's Digest are two other popular and highly rated online writing course providers. (It should be noted the author has no connection with any of these websites).
Free online writing courses can improve the writing skills of professionals and those seeking to enter the field. They may just provide the boost you need!
A member of the BrainTrack writing staff since 2008, Brian Jenkins is an expert on a variety of career and education topics.
Interested in contributing a guest blog post of your own? Check out the guest blogger guidelines. Flickr image courtesy of Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com