Guidelines

This is your guide to passing your Creative Writing thesis. You enroll in CW 200a in the 1st Semester of your senior year. Soon after enrollment, you choose a Thesis Adviser from among the Creative Writing Program faculty.

Working with your adviser, you then prepare a collection of creative works, of publishable quality, that makes up one part of the Creative Writing Thesis. The collection of creative works is composed of any of the following:

15 original poems
7 short stories
15 sudden fiction pieces
7 essays/creative nonfiction pieces
7 one-act plays
1 full-length play (two- to three-acts)
1 novella

The collection follows a thematic, structural, or critical organizing principle. You may choose to organize your collection around a theme or subject, a structural question (about a literary element or device, like narrative form or use of irony), or a critical perspective (feminism, postmodern, postcolonial, and so on).

You submit this collection in preparation for the CW 200a Workshop held before the end of the 1st Semester.

The Creative Writing Program faculty sits as panel in the Workshop. They evaluate the submitted works to determine if the student can proceed to CW 200b. The final grade for CW 200a, however, appears in the transcript as S (Satisfactory) or U (Unsatisfactory).

Students earn an S when they have submitted all the drafts of creative works to be included in the thesis, and have met the requirements or standards set by the adviser and panelists. They earn a U when they have submitted all the drafts but failed to meet the requirements or standards set by the adviser and panelists, or when they fail to submit all the drafts of creative works.

In the 2nd Semester of your senior year, and granted that you earned an S in CW 200a, you then enroll in CW 200b.

You continue to work with your Thesis Adviser from the 1st Semester to prepare the other part of the Creative Writing Thesis, the critical preface, and to revise your collection of creative works.

The critical preface incorporates the discussion of the organizing principle along with the following:

Conceptual design, or how the literary pieces were conceived in terms of the unifying organizing principle
Personal aesthetics of the writer or one’s development as a writer
Genetic criticism of at least three (3) selected original pieces analyzed in terms of creative process, revision, and effort at craftsmanship

By the midterm of the 2nd Semester, you should be ready to submit the complete draft of your Creative Writing Thesis -- both the critical preface and the revised collection of creative works.

You then present your completed thesis during the Oral Defense scheduled after the midterm. You will be given 15 minutes to present an overview of your work, focusing on key points of your thesis. You then present yourself to a 30-minute public discussion of your thesis, fielding comments and/or questions from the panelists and audience.

You earn a numerical final grade for CW 200b when you submit six (6) bound copies of your revised final thesis. The combined ratings given by your thesis panel makes up 60% of your final grade, while 40% comes from the rating given by your thesis adviser.

Aside from your Oral Defense, you are also required to read pieces or excerpts from your collection in a public performance organized by your graduating class, with some assistance from other BA English students and the Creative Writing Program.

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