Smith College's Moodle

Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste: All our reality as we know it comes to us through our senses. We share a world filtered and perceived through a million sensibilities, and finding the words to convey what we hear, see, smell, taste, and feel is one of the most fundamental skills a writer can develop. In this class we will hone our descriptive powers to go beyond the obvious and clichéd and uncover language that delights and surprises us even in the act of writing. We will learn to use one sense to write about another, and to combine them in powerful metaphors. We will explore how our senses drive us and how they shape narrative.

In terms of subject matter, we'll be writing about art, music, perfume, fashion, and especially food. In the first weeks of the class we'll work on the mechanics of description and style. In the latter weeks, we'll apply those skills by availing ourselves of campus resources - the museum of art, the botanic garden, places to eat, to test our skills against real life source materials.

While we will be reading texts from writers who are masters of sense description each week, our real emphasis will be on practice. We'll build skills with exercises and short assignments in class and out of it, remembering always that simply by being alive we have the tools we need to build powerful stories and memorable worlds.