Program Overview

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Centre for Continuing Education

The Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Sydney offers a diverse range of professional development short courses. These courses are designed to enhance professional development, grow technical and people skills, and support career progression.

Course Subjects

The Centre offers courses in various subjects, including:

• Business and management
  • Business communication
  • Business strategy
  • Business writing
  • Cultural competence and diversity
  • Finance
  • Leadership
  • Management
  • Organisational psychology
  • Sales and customer service
• English
• HSC preparation (years 10-12)
  • HSC biology
  • HSC business studies
  • HSC chemistry
  • HSC economics
  • HSC English
  • HSC mathematics
  • HSC physics
  • Year 11 (Revision)
  • Years 10-12 study and essay skills
• Humanities and culture
  • Creative writing
  • Music
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology
• Information technology
  • Adobe
  • AI and machine learning courses
  • Data analysis and analytics
  • Google
  • Microsoft
• Language
  • Arabic
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Chinese
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Spanish
• Marketing
  • Digital marketing
  • Marketing communications
  • Product development
• Project management
  • Agile methodology courses
  • Change management for projects
  • Stakeholder and people management
  • Technical project management skills

Writing the Real Course

This writing course offers a rich immersion in creative nonfiction, practical tuition and instruction in composition and style, along with plenty of opportunities to write and be inspired. The course explores the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction and the meanings of real and truthful.

Course Details

• Duration: 4 sessions, 12 hours total
• Next date: 10 March 2026
• Cost: A$480.00
• Location: Newtown (venue TBA)
• Delivery mode: Face-to-face

Course Information

The course provides a rich immersion in creative nonfiction, practical tuition and instruction in composition and style, along with plenty of opportunities to write and be inspired. It encourages writers to understand nonfiction as literature and shows them how to employ imagination, discipline, creativity and lyricism in its composition.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, participants should be able to:

• Discover the material in their life and world that calls them to write about it
• Practise writing non-fiction prose in different genres – essay, memoir, feature journalism, blog, history, travel
• Make of the life they lead, the thoughts they think, the places and things they know, works told as freshly and vividly as the best fiction
• Grow good ideas and arrange life experiences into finished works of literary art
• Apply time-honoured techniques and insights to take their writing from good to great and make it into a work that may touch and change others’ lives.

Content

The course covers:

• Foundations
• Approach
• Writing practice
• The literature of witness and attention
• The language of solid ground
• Nonfiction as literature
• Essays
• Principles of writing well
• The elements of style
• Words and music
• The importance of place
• Form and structure
• Planning
• Coherence
• Writing with your reader in mind
• Getting started
• Carrying on
• The ethics of nonfiction
• Editing and finishing
• Fourteen troublesome words and phrases

Intended Audience

The course is suitable for anyone wanting to write well about the world we inhabit, the things we know - from family history to politics, from sport to philosophy, from self-help to biography and travel.

Delivery Modes

The course is available in two delivery modes:

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop
• Online workshop via the platform Zoom

Delivery Style

The workshop marries informally delivered pedagogy with inspirational ideas and practical tips from an experienced professional writer. It models great writing through a selection of fine readings across all genres; and it invites participants to write each week and receive tutelage and feedback from the facilitator and fellow participants.

Materials

Course notes are distributed electronically using Dropbox.

Organisational Training

For groups of six or more, courses can be delivered to your team with the option to tailor content.

Meet the Facilitators

Mark Tredinnick, winner of the Montreal Poetry Prize (2011) and the Cardiff Poetry Prize (2012), is the author of The Blue Plateau, Fire Diary, and nine other acclaimed works of poetry and prose.

Testimonials

Participants have praised the course, saying it has helped them find their own voice in writing and feel confident in writing about topics they would not have thought possible before. The facilitator is described as a generous teacher who shares his love of writing with his students and makes them think about each sentence construction.