Proposal Guidelines and Forms
Sometimes a prospective employer may offer guidelines or
forms, and when those are online they help everyone. Check your local adult education
center s website to see if it offers online proposal guidelines. Read whatever
information you can find for online writing classes at your favorite writing sites, too.
In most cases a proposal will need to include at least
five basic elements:
1. Your contact and personal information
(such as citizenship status, for payment purposes) as well as your professional biography.
2. Your sense of the target audience for your class.
3. Your sense of what students will gain/learn from your class.
4. Your sense of course expenditures (including costs for guest lecturers
or other needs, especially for ˇ°liveˇ± classes).
5. Contact information for individuals who will serve as referees for
you.
Still, if you can t find the specific program proposal
guidelines and requirements that you need online, you must contact program directors at
local colleges/continuing education programs by phone or e-mail, yourself. Explain that
you are a writer who is interested in learning about the procedures for proposing courses.
Be forewarned that institutions and programs operate on different schedules; some may plan
ahead just weeks at a time, while others may have an entire academic year already set the
previous winter.
Fine. What if, after all that, you're simply instructed
to send a cover letter and a general course proposal? What then?
I trust all professional writers to handle cover letters.
You should also take this opportunity to update your resume or c.v. and review your list
of references in case you are, indeed, asked for that information as the screening process
continues, too. It s also a good idea to review your clip file and consider which of
your writing samples you might submit if requested to do so.
As for the proposal itself, here are some additional
elements that will render it immediately more professional and complete:
6. Your name, title
("Instructor" is fine if applicable!), and, again for ˇ°liveˇ± courses
especially, a note about your office hours, if you plan to hold them ("by
appointment" or "to be determined"). Place this information in the top
left-hand corner.
7. The course title. Be sure it accurately reflects the course content.
One of my early course was titled ˇ°The Historical Novel: A Writing Workshop.ˇ± I like
poets and essayists and playwrights just fine, but this course wasn t for them!
8. The course description. Catalog copy generally runs tight. Try to
describe your course in no more than 75-100 words; be prepared to cut this description
even further. View samples from previous catalogs or listings to get a sense of the
institution or program s editorial style. Be direct about the purpose/goal of the
course.
For example, here s a description for the historical
novel workshop mentioned above:
"This workshop is for writers of historical novels. Through tailored writing
exercises and discussion of selected texts, the course will address issues of particular
challenge to historical novelists: use of real characters, setting, and tensions between
fact and fiction. Primary focus, however, will be on critiques of students' work."
9. Prerequisites (if applicable). A line
such as: "Students must submit a one-page synopsis and five pages of their
work-in-progress" signals from the start that only writers particularly committed to
their work should enroll.
10. Schedule of meetings and reading/writing assignments. This doesn't
necessarily have to be set in stone, but you'll acquire--and convey--a better sense of
your own course if you think ahead to the class meetings and to how you will be making use
of each.
One writing program director once advised me that
prospective students tended to respond favorably to having some mention of the authors
they d be reading for a course within the description, so it can make sense to provide
the same information, in even greater detail, for the ˇ°authorities,ˇ± too.
Once you are preparing the actual syllabus for a course,
you'll want to delineate additional policies. Depending on the class/institution, you may
need to think about grading policies. And a writing workshop benefits from a set of
critique guidelines everyone understands from the start.
But don't worry too much about that. Yet. Start with the proposal, and add that to your
writing practice.
© Copyright 2004 Erika Dreifus. All rights reserved. Article reprint permission is
granted provided that the entire article--including the About the Author
information--remains intact and unaltered. Please send a courtesy copy of the reprint to erikadrei@yahoo.com.
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