Sports Writing (Workshop)

For many students sports is central to their life and a thriving topic of conversation – and so a great way to engage them in writing and reading. From hard news to classic novels sports allows many avenues for students to enter the field of writing. In fact, many who reject writing and literature out-of-hand can be seized by the writing bug through sports. How do I know this? For many years I taught writing in secondary schools and these days I teach Professional Writing for Sport at Victoria University in Melbourne and have seen the turnaround in students who never saw writing as something that was for them. There are as many facets to sports writing as there are sports. These workshops help students become ‘writing jocks’. NB. A number of my novels also have an important sports component (inc the Change the Game series)

This session can be delivered as a talk rather than a workshop if required.

Topics:

• hard news and sports reporting
• feature articles
• the sport that I love
• the sport that I hate
• people in sport (famous and the ‘unknown’)
• game analysis (their own and others’ performance)
• radio commentary
• short stories, plays, poetry
• description (games, events, crowds…)
• humourous and terrifying anecdotes
• fanzine writing
• speeches (acceptance, coach…)
• dialogue (crowd, on the field…)
• book reviews
• match reviews
• drafting and re-writing