What I'm Taking This Semester

I'm really excited about my classes this semester.

English 452: Advanced Professional Writing. This will be my most work-intensive class. There's only 14 people in the class, and we're editing two online courses for American Virtual Academy, a collection of short stories written by a faculty member, a historical novel, creating play notes for a campus production (writing, design, and production), and creating a website. 14 people, 14 weeks for all that. Wheee! Here we go! My teacher's really cool though, and I have a lot of friends in the class. It should be really fun.

English 400: Copywriting and Grant Writing. Funny how just learning a few principles of good ad writing suddenly makes every poor advertisement stick out. This class shouldn't be terribly work-intensive, and it's fun. I have a lot of friends in it as well. I wrote an ad for Wyoming tourism and my next project is for the Black and Decker Steam Mop with Smart Choice Technology. (Anyone use it? Why would you buy a steam mop? Why do you think they picked such a long name?)

English 318: Creative Nonfiction. This is a creative writing class, gasp. It's fun, and very different from my professional writing classes. But I love creative nonfiction, and it'll be good to stretch and write something else. Funny story: We did an in-class exercise and had to describe the room in our childhood home that we hated. (I picked the laundry room.) After we'd written, my teacher showed us a poor example, and said, "Most of you probably wrote sentences like this: 'I always hated when my mom sent down to the cold, dark basement.' That's ok, but it's feelings and not true description. We usually have a tendency to write about feelings and not description. Look at what you wrote and circle all your actual description." I looked at mine and the. entire. thing. was description. Technical writers don't have feelings. But as a few people read theirs, and I reread mine, I realized that my description was very house-appraiser-ish and not really literary. So I don't know if that was a fail or win.

CIT 140: Introduction to Excel. Such an easy class. I did all the homework for two weeks in an hour. But I'm learning some really cool things that Excel can do. It's really funny to go back to a 100 level class as a senior and hear the freshman lectures again. I haven't heard, "You are expected to do all the homework on time in college courses," for a very long time. It's a fun and useful class.

FDREL 404: Writings of Isaiah. One of my very favorite classes, like, ever. Mind blown every day. My teacher is phenomenal. He grew up Jewish and converted when he was in high school. He's fluent in Hebrew, so he can really explain some of the weird language in the Old Testament. He's also really, really funny. We studied Isaiah 1/2nd Nephi 16 and then I went to the temple again, and the whole time, I was like "Wow! Wow! Wow! I never noticed that before! What?!" Mind blowing. Life changing. I'll have to post about some of the tools we use to study and some of the cool things I learn.

Here's to a great semester!