Save Creative Writing in TAFE

As an award winning playwright who studied at RMIT between 2000 and 2003, I wish to reiterate that the importance of the current Tafe Prof Writing and Editing Course cannot be underestimated in terms of the industry based practice and training it offers.

Creative writing is not a hobby! It leads to all manner of concrete outcomes, from the people who write our TV shows, plays and films, to the myriad of freelance writers who make their living as I do, from a variety of freelance activities, both creative writing (plays), editing, teaching and facilitating. The accessability of the Tafe environment along with industry based teachers mean that real, concrete skills are developed. Do not shorten this course. It will be to the detriment of our cultural and social capital.

#75: - Rob the writer 

You need the course Rob to develop a clear narrative.

It's important to save Creative Writing in educational institutions like universities and TAFE as it is a main avenue for new writers to move forward into higher degrees at university and to break into the publishing world. I say "don't stop the flow, keep it coming". Having completed my Masters in Publishing & Editing at Monash University last year, I can say with complete confidence that the country needs Creative Writing to remain complete, even to expand, but definitely not to diminish. Thank you for giving me the chance to vote.

#52: Elise Hurst - Course cost 

 Sensibly and integrally said. 

#55: Amanda Burton - For business and for pleasure 

 That was me, sorry. 

#55: Amanda Burton - For business and for pleasure 

 YES!  And are not birds at the so said beginning of the evolutionary line?   Don't misunderstand, I love communing with them, but there's only so much that can be said; 'what a nice day' or ' oh, there's rain coming.'  Or, are we perhaps on the verge of morphing into Walt Disney clones, I ask.

Fully morphing that is. 

#82: Sue Gannon - Graduate. Dip PW&E (21675VIC) 

#82: Sue Gannon - Graduate. Dip PW&E (21675VIC) 

As another graduate, I am appalled that I feel compelled to join you in appending course code 21675VIC to my post-nominal. Yet I must, for I do not wish my qualification being diminished by the inevitable association with the new monstrosity.

The author(s) of this travesty deserve endless shame for creating this soulless assault on what was a superb if still flawed course.

Are they actually trying to destroy this course?

It has been rendered irrelevant!

#26: David Trembath - Some facts 

Dear Mr Trembath,

I should like to draw your attention to a couple of things you wrote in in your post:

"We added an editing unit where previously none had existed giving us some pause for thought when we wondered what had happened before in a course called writing and editing."

Okay, Mr Trembath, if "previously none (editing units) existed", then how the devil did I earn an HD in Editing 2?

Or have my RPL for Editing 1 approved?

Then, you begin your post with: "... but as the person who wrote the course ..."

"Wrote the course"? What exactly did YOU write?

Is it not the case that the new course consists of a group of Units of Competency written by other sources?

Are you claiming to own copyrigh overt those Units of Competency?

If you wrote this, is that not what you are saying?

If that is not what you meant, then what exactly do you mean?

#6: Lewis Counihan - Night of the long pens 

Educational Fascists indeed!

Finally they have found something more bureaucratically efficient to do than burn the books.

Why not burn the writers' resources?

That way, there will be no books in need of burning.

At least they are saving the environment by not adding to global warming by pumping literary carbon into the air.