Telling a Good Story: Non-fiction Writing Skills Development in“Taiwanese Reportage” Course

With the rapidly changing environments and the emerging needs of the publishing market, narrative techniques have become a cornerstone in university education. The purpose of this project is to adopt the theme from the course “Journalistic Interview and Writing”, and transform traditional literature analysis and theoretic exploration to writing skill and procedure development. We put “nonfiction writing skills” into the course of “Taiwanese Reportage”. In order to adopt the universal context of this major change, the theme of the students’ reading is “Breaking Life,”which is also the book’s name by Taiwanese writer A-Bo. From the impermanence perspective of earthquake, disaster and disease, we lead students to read and understand the writers’ concerns about Taiwanese society and people through writing. Furthermore, students can learn how to write nonfiction works. To polish the students’ writing skills, this project plans to engage the students with the whole writing process, which includes interview preparation, actual interview, and post-interview processing. Last but not least, to cultivate “meta-cognition” in students, the feedback and evaluation from professional writers and peers are essential. Therefore, the project will study the students’ works, writers’ evaluation and peers review, to help students build their work templates and to observe if this project can raise students’ motivations while cultivating their storytelling capabilities