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Intermediate Film Writing
193 001 | CCN: 33028
Location: Dwinelle 188
Date and Time: W, F 12:30pm - 1:59pm
4 Units
Moving-image media are compelling sites of cultural work. Writing about motion pictures
poses peculiar challenges – and offers distinct pleasures – for students in disciplines across
the university. Yet it is unusual for a course that analyzes the moving image to teach students
how to do so with clarity and confidence. What vocabularies do students writing about film,
television, YouTube, or TikTok need to know? How do we engage texts in these mediums on
their own terms, as visual objects of analysis? How do we do so in a way that is academically
rigorous, drawing on scholarly interlocutors to contribute to a broader intellectual conversation?
This writing-intensive course will use weekly writing assignments of 750 to 2000 words as a
space to explore and find answers to these questions, each of which corresponds to a type of
essay we will read and write together. We will start with the basics: examining the attitudes and
practices we bring to the process of academic writing, including how we perceive our academic
voices, assess the assignments we receive, and plan and complete our writing projects. As a
community of practice, we will engage in real conversations about the challenges of academic
writing, including time management and how to confront writer’s block. From here, the course
will move to identify the specific skills and processes that facilitate positive – even pleasurable
– academic writing experiences. As we read and write together, we will build the skills and
confidence that make writing as a process of intellectual exploration satisfying for its own sake.More specifically, this course focuses on helping students cultivate the skills to write the
three types of essay that form the basic unit structure of the semester: sequence analysis,
analytical essay, and critical essay. No matter their major, students with an interest in writing
about moving-image media will find these essay types familiar, interesting, and relevant to their
course of study. A sequence analysis focuses on a single film sequence: presenting and
interpreting evidence of this sequence’s cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound in
order to make an argument about what the sequence means or what cultural work it is
accomplishing. An analytical essay does the same thing, but at a larger scale: bringing together
evidence from different parts of a single film in order to make an argument about what the film is
doing formally and culturally. A critical essay also engages the film as a whole, but uses a piece
of scholarship as critical framework or lens through which to view the film. In a critical essay,
we explain what our critical framework is arguing, apply it to the film as a new object of
analysis, and extend the original scholarship’s ideas by identifying what the film can show us
about these ideas that we haven’t seen before. This last essay type, as Emily explains in the
Writing Guide that will form the basis of our work in the final unit of the course, performs the
gesture at the heart of academic writing: it engages and refines the work of a scholarly
interlocutor, thereby contributing to a broad conversation about shared intellectual concerns.The class structure will cultivate students’ sense of sharing in this conversation by fostering
collaborations between students and by inviting faculty to share their experiences as
writers. Students will join together in writing pods where they will share their work and support
each other in extending and revising their writing assignments throughout the semester. With the
support of their peers and instructors, they will workshop their own writing at different stages of
the process and engage in multi-stage revision designed to improve clarity, rigor, and
persuasiveness rather than simply correct errors. Faculty visitors will share their experience
with the types of writing we are working on; students and faculty will meet as colleagues who
share the pleasures of an intellectual path and the challenges of clear and persuasive expression.
Not only will students craft their own sequence analyses, analytical and critical essays; they will
also author a personal paper development and self-revision guide. In this document, each student
will identify their personal areas of challenge and success, note which parts of the process
require significant investment of time and effort, and outline self-revision strategies that will help
the student prepare and submit outstanding essays in future coursework. Students can take this
document into future classes knowing that they have a strong sense of themselves as writers and
a roadmap for essay-writing that works for them. At the end of the semester, students will walk
away with a portfolio of polished work that includes final drafts of their sequence analysis,
analytical essay, critical essay, and personal writing guide.Students must have completed R1A and R1B to enroll in this course. We welcome sophomore,
junior, and senior students from any major who have a special interest in writing about the
moving image. Students in Film & Media who wish to write an honors thesis should take this
course followed by Film & Media 194: Advanced Film Writing.