The Writing Minor at Queens College is designed to offer students extensive practice writing to enhance their majors. The program enables students to gain experience writing in a range of genres and media–in preparation for life and work in the twenty-first century. The curriculum is flexible, to enable students to pursue their goals and interests. It emphasizes the professional contexts and continuous digital innovations that shape what it means to be a successful writer.
Writing is fundamental to a wide variety of professions–and an asset in most. As scholar Deborah Brandt observes, writing has become more central than ever to the economy —and to the daily work of jobs as varied as media, creative arts, law, human rights advocacy, journalism, publishing, police work, marketing, content creation, software development, and urban planning (to name a very few).
Doctors and EMTs write case reports; professionals in the field of non-profit write reports and grants; journalists write stories, columns, and opinion pieces; content creators write proposals and web content. Writers in all these fields must be deft practitioners of craft and rhetoric–narrative, voice, style, evidence, analysis, structure, persuasion, description.
Who is the Writing Minor for?
Courses in the minor teach these elements from a variety of perspectives in a variety of genres. The Writing Minor thus aims to serve a variety of students:
- Students who envision a career in writing—broadly conceived from the essayist to the technical writer—and will need to be proficient in multiple genres and for multiple media.
- Students who will pursue post-graduate opportunities that require them to be excellent writers, including graduate school and/or careers in law, publishing, non-profit organizations, education, or politics.
- Students who wish to gain experience in writing that will serve them in their undergraduate majors.
What Are the Requirements?
The writing minor is an 18-credit (6 course sequence), with particular requirements in different areas. Students pursuing the minor choose one of three tracks–Writing for Professions, Creative Writing, or Theories and Practices of Writing.
Students are required to take at least one course in each track. For the remaining 9 credits (or 3 classes), students can choose which writing courses to take. Please see the attached advisement sheet for a list of the courses in each track.
Requirements for the Minor in Writing
Required (18 credits)
Only 3 Creative Writing courses (9 credits) can be applied to the Minor in Writing (see the list below). If a course appears in more than one category, a student can choose which category to apply it. See the Writing Minor Advisement Form.
The Minor
To meet the requirements for graduation as a Writing minor a student must maintain an average of 2.0 in the required and elective work in Writing and complete the course sequence described in the box on this page. At least 12 credits in the minor must be completed at Queens College.
