SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION
Cmns 478-4 (E1.00)

 

Stephen Osborne	Fall Semester 2001
Downtown office/tel TBA, c/o 291-5240	Harbour Centre Evening
email: sosborne@geist.com

Publishing Project Group:

THE PUBLISHING VOICE

Prerequisites:

60 credit hours and at least one course in publishing or permission of the instructor. Recommended: CMNS375 (Magazine Publishing). Special permission may be granted to talented writers. Course enrollment limited to 20 students.

Instructor:

Stephen Osborne, founder and editor-in-chief of Geist, Canada's most successful literary magazine, and founder and director of Arsenal Pulp Press Book Publishers Ltd. Stephen Osborne is one of Canada's foremost prose stylists.

Course Description:

The interplay of writing, editing and other processes of publishing creates the aura and the personality of a publication (or a publishing house): in short, a publishing voice. The publishing voice is the foundation upon which the identity of a magazine or book publishing house is built. It also acts as the filter through which an audience is identified and a lure to bring that audience to the publication. This course will study aspects of the publishing voice by examining the writing and editing styles of an array of cultural magazines, identifying their audiences, and assessing their effectiveness in speaking to and for those audiences. This examination will not take place solely in the abstract or in an analytical mode. Particular magazines and publishing houses will be examined, and students will come to understand the construction of a publishing voice through course assignments that reflect the process of creating such a voice.

Required Readings:

Didion, Joan, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar Straus. ISBN 0-374-52172-7.
Orwell, George, The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-018803-7.
Osborne, Stephen, Ice and Fire. Arsenal Pulp Press. ISBN 1-55152-061-3.

Skill base:

This course is heavily oriented towards writing and writing style and the emergence of the voice of a publication on the basis of writing (and images) used in a magazine. It will demand of students not only an ability to write well but also the capacity to be able to identify in their own and in the writing of others, the nature of the style used and how it can contribute to a publication's voice. Students must submit a piece of writing, no longer than 500 words that will be assessed by the instructor and form the basis of entrance into the course.

Evaluation:

1st Essay 30%
2nd Essay 30%
Contribution to Class Discussion 15%
Take Home Exam: Editorial Assignment 25%

The School expects that the grades awarded in this course will bear some reasonable relation to established university-wide practices with respect to both levels and distribution of grades. In addition, the School will follow Policy T10.02 with respect to "Intellectual Honesty," and "Academic Discipline" (see the current Calendar, General Regulations Section).

Schedule:

First Class: -- Introductory.
(a) Assign Magazines:
Geist, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Night, Harpers, Canadian Forum, Canadian Geographic, Border Crossings, Malahat Review, Descant, Subterrain. And others: more "popular" magazines will also come under scrutiny, as student interest suggests.
(b) Define Course Topics:
--What is the Publishing Voice
--Elements of a Magazine
--Editorial Roles
--Writer's roles
(c) Define Assignments:
--Analysis of Voice
--Personal Essay (Short piece in style of selected magazine)
--Literary Journalism (Somewhat longer essay of reportage)
--Assign Editorial & Discussion Groups
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1st Month
--Readings in Selected Magazines
--Elements of the Publishing Voice
--Extending the Editorial Voice into Marketing
--Personality of the Magazine
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2nd Month
--Magazine Analysis
--More Readings in Selected Magazines
--Readings
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3rd Month
--Readings
--2nd Essay
--Editorial work on Literary Journalism
--Take Home exam