10 Amazing Free Online Writing Courses
Posted September 5, 2010 in Tools/Resources, Writing
Do you have a degree or formal training in writing?
If you answered “no,” you can still pick up some crucial writing skills. There are a number of free online writing courses for the shrewd freelancer to take advantage of.
Writing skills are important for all freelancers. If you think about it, we freelancers do an awful lot of writing. We write emails to clients, we write content for our websites, we write proposals, and so on.
However, all of that writing won’t do us any good if it’s full of mistakes. You can learn to improve your writing skills at no cost to you.
In this post, we list ten free online writing courses. We also discuss what to expect from a free online course and explain how you can find more courses.
Free Writing Courses Worth Investigating
The free courses below can help you to improve your writing skills:
- Learn to Write a Feasability Study from About.com’s About U. I took a similar course in college. If you’ve never written a feasibility study, here’s your chance to learn how.
- Writing Interview Winning Resumes also from About.com’s About U. Knowing how to write a good cover letter and resume is important to job hunters, but it’s also a good skill for any freelancers to have. This course will show you how.
- Intensive Grammar Workshop also from About.com’s About U. A great, free grammar course for beginning writers, non-native writers of English, or experienced pros looking to freshen their skills. Remember that poor grammar could cost you a gig…
- Introduction to Technical Communication: Explorations in Scientific and Technical Writing from MITOpenCourseware. Learn some of the basics of technical writing by following the course notes and syllabus of an MIT instructor.
- Becoming Digital: Writing About Media Change from MITOpenCourseware. Learn how changing media has affected communications from an MIT instructor’s course notes. This sounds very interesting.
- The NetWriting Masters Course from Writer’s Helper. A free 49-page e-book on writing for the web by Ken Evoy. Learn how to write for the Internet.
- The School of Journalism at Wikiversity. This isn’t one course, but rather, a whole online journalism department through Wikiversity. Pick one course, or take all of them.
- Technical Writing. Again, not one course, but a series of courses through Wikiversity. This can be a great way to learn more about technical writing.
- Marketing Writing Tips from the HP learning center. Page through lessons that illustrate common business writing mistakes and explain how to avoid them.
- Creative Writing 101 free course on creative writing from Suite 101. Is creative writing your dream? This course contains eight lessons. Once you finish this course, you may wish to follow it up with their Creative Writing Workshop.
What to Expect from a Free Online Course
In general, free online courses differ from college courses or professional courses that you pay for in that you work at your own pace. In most instances, your work is not graded and you will not receive a certificate or any kind of college credit for your work.
The online course may provide materials to read, notes, and other links. It may even provide some interactive quizzes. However, you are basically on your own when you take a free course. It is up to you to make the most of the training.
In addition to offering free courses, many of the sites listed also offer college courses or otherwise sell professional classes and/or materials.
How to Get the Most from a Free Online Course
Although you may not receive credit for a free online course, there are ways for you to maximize the experience.
Here are three steps you can take to get the most from your online training:
- Set aside a dedicated time to work on the course.
- Give the course 100% of your effort while you are working on it.
- Take notes and/or save your work.
In addition, you should keep a record of the free online courses you took, the link where you found the material, and the date you took it. This information can come in handy if a client questions where your knowledge came from, or if you want to brush up on what you learned.
How to Find More Free Online Courses
Free courses are not just limited to the writing field. There’s actually a huge volume of free coursework available on the Internet–much of it is underutilized because many freelancers are unaware that it exists.
Many of the sources I listed above also offer free courses in other fields:
- About U is sponsored by the popular information site, About.com. They offer courses on a wide variety of topics ranging from Arts & Literature to Travel (and many topics in between).
- The MITOpenCourseware project is part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, an organization of many higher education institutions dedicated to providing open learning materials. The MIT site alone contains over 2,000 courses in various fields.
- Wikiversity is comprised of a large number of learning resources for students at all levels.
Of course, you can find many of your own free training resources by using the search engines.
What About You?
Have you already taken free courses online? Share links to the courses that you liked in the comments.
Also, if you take one of the courses listed in this post come back and let us know what you thought of it.
Related posts:
- 5 Ways to Promote Your Business for Free Online
- 21 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use Every Day!
- 22 Amazing Free WordPress Themes
- 20 Free Amazing Premium WordPress Themes
- 10 Amazing Free Stock Photography Sites
About the author: Laura Spencer is a freelance writer from North Central Texas with over 20 years of professional business writing experience. If you liked this post, then you may also enjoy Laura’s blog about her freelance writing experiences, WritingThoughts. Laura is also on Google+.
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58 Comments
Jordan Walker
September 5th, 2010 at 9:47 amI reckon those courses would benefit my written grammar skills, which would translate into more effective communication with clients.
Thanks Laura for the links.
Stephanie
September 5th, 2010 at 8:27 pmThanks Laura for this awesome post! I already starred this post so that I can turn to it when I have the time to sharpen my writing skills. I’m particularly interested in the Netwriting Masters Course and the Technical Writing course.
Freelance FactFile
September 6th, 2010 at 8:59 amIt’s great to know there are free courses out there. The ones I have taken have all been paid-for courses so I’ll definitely check these out. Thanks for the useful info.
James
September 6th, 2010 at 9:42 amThe (7) School of Journalism at Wikiversity, doesn’t really exist. It is only two webpages. The first showing all the schools courses. All of those course are “page does not exist” links, except the first, “History of Journalism”, which contains 4 paragraphs. As the page has not been updated since Aug 2009, clearly nothing is happening there any time soon. So, somebody got around to thinking about creating this, but didn’t actually get around to it.
In fact, if you go to the Wikiversity Main Page there is a “Resources by completion status”, which shows 74 pages under “Completed Resources” and 334 pages under “Freshly started resources”, which includes the “Journalism Stream”.
Laura Spencer
September 6th, 2010 at 10:19 amThanks James!
I think you’re right. Someone has started the Journalism area and not finished it. It’s definitely something to keep tabs on and check later to see if anything has been added.
My preference would be for one of the MITOpenCourseware courses, since those are based on actual college syllabuses. But, of course, it depends on what one is looking for in taking a course.
剑桥雅思
September 6th, 2010 at 11:22 amGreat post, Thank you. I’ll introduce some of them to my Chinese students.
logolitic
September 6th, 2010 at 2:50 pmthank you for these useful informations! I read your blog regularly and I find it very very useful!
Steve Atkinson
September 6th, 2010 at 6:40 pmThanks,
I’m going to take a look at these.
Bakari
September 7th, 2010 at 11:39 pmI want to check these out as well. Perhaps a follow-up article might be some affordable online courses where you get feedback from instructors. I’ve seen courses on mediabestro.com.
Laura Spencer
September 10th, 2010 at 12:51 pmThanks to everyone who is checking these out. Be sure to come back and share your experiences.
BTW, James, I have learned the Technical Writing area at Wikiversity is much more complete. I probably should have linked to that one.
Cindy Teitelbaum
October 21st, 2010 at 11:34 amnice post
Sandys Pizza
October 21st, 2010 at 1:01 pmVery informative. Are you going to post more on this?
Clara Freeman
November 4th, 2010 at 6:53 pmGreat, I’m going to sign up for a few of these!
Clara.
Michael LaRocca
November 5th, 2010 at 2:45 amThanks for an awesome list. I’m creating an online writing course myself, so this is extremely useful “fuel to my fire.”
John
March 30th, 2011 at 2:06 pmI’m enrolled in a university’s technical writing certification program. Trouble is that this summer there are no classes offered that I need to complete my studies. I’m looking for college credit courses I can take online in “Critical Literacy”, “Medical Writing”, “Reports, Proposals and Grants” and “Professional Editing”.
Does anyone know of quality courses I could take?
Thanks
Jenise
January 23rd, 2012 at 3:15 amThank you Laura for writing and posting this article.
For a while now, I’ve been trying to find some type of training for freelancing jobs. I’ve decided to practice by posting product reviews and such on one famous web site. However, I’ve received negative and harsh comments about my writing. By over over my review, I’ve notice that most of my article have plenty of grammar errors and sentence fragments. By taking the free course that you mention in this article, I can improve my writing and hopefully, try again at product review and be more careful about my writing.
Again, thank you Laura for the article.
Eduardo Lau
March 22nd, 2012 at 8:15 amCan you please send an e-mail to me the code for this script or please let know me in detail regarding this script?munich shoes
Mel
November 7th, 2012 at 2:12 pmThanks so much for this list. So helpful :)
John
December 13th, 2012 at 9:29 amDon’t forget http://alison.com/
Not only do they have a wide range of useful online courses but you can get a certificate.
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May 19th, 2013 at 12:38 amI am going to look at it . It is useful.
Thank you Laura.
Connie Miller
June 9th, 2013 at 11:08 pmI have not tried any of the courses yet but they do seem very interesting. I will update this post once I have completed one of the courses.
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