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Dr Chris Westoby: Hi. My name's Chris. I'm the programme director here on the MA Creative Writing online at the University of Hull. In this video, I'd like to discuss how your learning happens here, how this course sees you progress to being a complete prose writer. You'll be working with a number of published expert writers. Your learning comes in the form of lectures, exercises, discussions, close readings, weekly workshops and live webinars.

At set points between assignment submissions, your tutor will provide formative feedback on your work to check that you're on course, absorbing each module's content and progressing okay. They'll help identify which areas of your craft to work on. And otherwise tease out the best in your writing, but most importantly of all, you're learning to do this too.

Your tutors will facilitate the weekly workshops, where in small groups of four or five, you each share the writing you've done that week in response to the week's learning. Giving up this writing you have done in private can be quite daunting at first. Well it may help to know that we all feel that, but you're in the company of like-minded writers who are each looking for guidance on how to improve. Our writer's workshops are a safe, supportive space for this to happen. On this programme, you are taught to locate and articulate where and how the piece you're looking at might be improved.

From an overarching structural or tonal suggestion down to the detail of a single clause. You are being trained to have that editorial eye that can identify here is a good piece of writing, but I can spot what will make it even better. Well, two reasons. Firstly, the more you hone your skills in editing other students work the better you become at editing your own. The expectation of a masters is that you become the experts. The peer feedback is part of this journey, you're able to get excited about your own practice to articulate and share knowledge and insight whilst taking onboard the knowledge and insights of others.

Secondly, after two years, this course comes to an end. We don't want your guidance to begin and end here. We want this course to be the launch pad for this process of improving your writing through workshop feedback to continuing fostering strong bonds, a writing community is vital here. To say we're passionate about the workshopping process would be an understatement. It is the crucible where good writers are trained.

Many who apply to this course, have already written a book, a novel, a memoir, and are looking for guidance in progressing or fine tuning this work. But this course isn't about making one piece of work better. It is about making you better as a writer. A writer who becomes equipped not only with the skill set to push a project to successful completion and future publication, but to feel ready and able to explore a multitude of other writing projects and styles you might have in mind.

To our students, we say be open to the forms of prose you may not yet be comfortable with We say enjoy that discomfort of the unknown. We have writers who join us being sure they are a fantasy novelist only to discover a passion for life writing, or writers who are accustomed to journalistic research heavy articles who find their true calling in surreal flash fiction. And of course, those who through the exploration of different genres strengthen their writing in the genre they know best because all of our modules speak to one another, they all contribute to your proficiency as a complete prose writer.