Featured: Professional Writing and the Senses: Composing with Beer, Food and Beyond (WRIT 3014)

When you read about recipes for dinners and/or drinks, how do you feel? What is your body telling you as you read them?  In Professional Writing and the Senses, we’ll practice writing about drinks and food in ways that taps into our five senses, including taste, smell, and touch.

For professional writers, this multisensory approach to writing is important because it supports context writing, scene setting and flavourful descriptions of “texts” (including drinks of all kinds!) for audiences. Writing even a short description for the back of a beer can or menu takes an enormous amount of creative thinking and collaboration between professional writers, artists and scientists.   

While beer is a primary emphasis in the course, you need not be a drinker of alcohol to engage in meaningful conversations and projects about writing and the senses. In addition to optional tastings, you’ll have a chance to interview professional writers and brewers who work in this highly collaborative industry.

Fun facts about beer and writing!

• The Greater Toronto Area boasts more than 30 breweries, many of which also serve delicious food and non-alcoholic beverages.
• The ancient rhetorician Cicero’s name has been co-opted by the brewery industry’s “Cicerone” training program, the word Cicerone translating roughly to “guide.” I am actually a “Certified Beer Server” in the program, as part of my training when I was tour guide at a Cincinnati, Ohio brewery.
• Breweries in Ontario and Quebec have been partnering with Link Up, a non-profit organization with a mission is to connect talented and passionate individuals from underrepresented communities within the craft beer industry. That mission includes professional writing!

Select Course Materials

• Ceraso, Steph. Sound Never Tasted So Good: “Teaching” Sensory Rhetorics, 2019. (open access)
• Mosher, Randy. Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink. Storey Publishing, LLC, 2017. Print.
• Numerous open-access resources on breweries in Canada and the Greater Toronto Area

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