Stories that Matter: The Craft of Writing Nonfiction
This program offers students a hands-on, immersive exploration of nonfiction writing and journalism. Through the five-week program, students learn to research, report, and craft compelling features, essays, and profiles while sharpening critical thinking and storytelling skills. Beyond the classroom, students experience the writing life firsthand—visiting museums, talking to sources, and observing the world with a journalist’s eye. By the end of the program, participants gain the confidence, language, and perspective to tell meaningful stories and understand the role of media in a democratic society.
Course Description
ENGL S2461, Stories that Matter: The Craft of Writing Nonfiction, is a two-credit course teaches the craft of writing nonfiction. Students learn how to produce features, essays, and profiles, and develop skills in critical thinking. Through close readings of exemplary reportage, students acquire a deeper understanding of narrative structure. Above all, this class shows students how to see the world as a writer. It is an exhilarating experience, one that will expand students' horizons, and it comes in part from being out and about—visiting places, talking to people, and taking notes. By the end of the course, students will have a new language for understanding the world, a richer, more literary one, and will be able to tell stories with verve and confidence. Students will tackle contemporary works of journalism and earlier pieces, including nineteenth-century dispatches and investigative articles. Students will look at ways that news organizations have served to fortify democratic principles such as freedom of expression and the rule of law, then and today. Students will grapple with real-life ethical questions, and you will leave the class with a better understanding of the role of the media in a liberal democracy.
Course Structure
This program will capture the spirit of the writing life—the exiting, dynamic, social and artistic world that a journalist inhabits—through an immersive program, one that is made up of the five separate steps in the writing process. Reflecting the writing journey, the five weeks of this course is structured as followed:
Week One: Researching Your Project
Students will generate story ideas and will begin researching their summer projects through documents, artwork, and other primary sources. Students will work with an archivest to explore these sources and will keep a journal about their research methods and process.
Week Two: The Art of the Interview
Students will learn how to find sources and will conduct interviews for their project. Students will learn techniques for securing interviews and can practice interviewing skills with their classmates.
Week Three: The Telling Detail
Students will follow a Yale method of learning how to be a better writer—by becoming a better observer first. Students will visit various campus resources to become observers in the field to capture details about a subject and the atmospheric elements used to create memorable scenes and build a narrative.
Week Four: The Edit Desk
Students will engage with the writing process by writing quickly and revising slowly, a guiding light for writers. Students will fine-tune methods for shaping and improving their nonfiction through the editing and peer feedback processes.
Week Five: Presentations
Students will showcase ther work they have chosen, designed, written, and produced. Students' projects can be added to their growing portfolios of written work. By this time, students will have a solid foundation in the skills of writing and a better understanding of what it means to be a professional writer.
Faculty Bio
Tara McKelvey was the White House correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), traveling around the world on Air Force One with Presidents Trump and Biden for a decade. Along with teaching at Yale, Tara has taught journalism and writing classes at Princeton University and Georgetown University. She is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and her writing about the CIA has received a Guggenheim Fellowship grant. She is also the author of an acclaimed book, Monstering: Inside American's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror World, about the CIA, military, and intelligence gathering.