Working in your own space, we will support you to refine your writing techniques, advance your editing skills and complete pieces of writing to a publishable standard. Your ideas and imagination are all that you need to get started.
Not only will you learn to critique your own work and that of others, but we will also teach you to prepare your work for publication.
Whether you are writing for children or adults, humour or horror, this online course provides excellent tutor support, peer review, mentoring and professional external editing to ensure you have all the feedback you need to excel.
Our students come from all walks of life, from school leavers looking for motivation, to grandparents wanting to fulfil lifelong dreams.
NorthTec’s Applied Writing Diploma was the first fully online writing programme in New Zealand. In its ten years, the Applied Writing programme has added new papers and seen considerable success with publication of many of the students' work. The programme is focused on writing for both adults and children. The writing for children specialisation includes papers on picture books and readers. Other papers include editing, research and writing in Te Reo Maori.
The new papers for 2010 are Research for Writers (a Level 6 paper offered in Semester 1) and Poetry 1 (a Level 5 paper offered in Semester 2). Research for Writers is aimed at writers who are going to work on a major project and teaches students the ethics, techniques, and research skills needed to produce work that could fit into a wide variety of genres - adult non-fiction, children’s non-fiction, biography, local history, family history, historical novels, etc.
Students have published work in a wide variety of genres – novels, picture books, School Journal articles and stories, newspaper articles, magazine articles, a short story collection, and one former student had her play taken to production. Students have also been placed in national short story competitions.
This course is ideal for:
- Aspiring writers and authors
- Writers without any formal training
- Anyone wanting to learn writing techniques
- Artists and other creative thinkers
- Anyone wanting to improve their understanding and skills
- Anyone looking to move into editing or non-fiction writing
All papers include individual feedback from experienced tutors, who are all published authors or experienced in their fields. Students also give each other feedback as part of the courses in order to develop critical thinking.
