BA Creative and Professional Writing

About this course

Creative and professional writing encompasses two apparently distinct but deeply connected modes of making with language. Creative writing asks you to develop your voice, your craft, and your imagination across forms including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scriptwriting for screen and stage, and experimental work. Professional writing extends those skills into contexts where language is put to work for specific purposes: journalism, copywriting, corporate communications, publishing, and cultural criticism. Together they train you to write with precision, flexibility, and awareness of audience, which is an unusually portable set of abilities. At the University of the West of England in Bristol, this programme is offered on a part-time basis, making it genuinely accessible to students who are balancing their studies with work, creative projects, or other commitments. The part-time mode allows you to develop your writing practice more gradually, which suits the reflective and iterative nature of good writing. The programme includes a sandwich year in industry and work placement, both of which give you direct professional experience in writing, publishing, or communications contexts before you graduate. Bristol is an excellent city in which to study writing: it has a lively publishing and media scene, a strong independent literary culture, and a range of organisations that offer meaningful placement opportunities. You will study fiction and non-fiction craft, screenwriting and scriptwriting, cultural criticism, publishing processes, and the practical demands of corporate and organisational writing. The combination means you will graduate with both a personal creative practice and a set of professional skills that employers in a wide range of industries value. Graduates of creative and professional writing programmes work in publishing, journalism, copywriting, content strategy, broadcasting, education, public relations, and the arts. Many also develop parallel careers as practising writers. Postgraduate study in creative writing, publishing, journalism, or communications is a natural progression for those who wish to develop their expertise in a particular direction.

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