Promoting Cultural Awareness Through The Arts

Language and Creative Writing


Language is more than just communication, it is the Primary method by which we do things together. Language is an accumulation of shared meaning - where we meet each other on common ground.

The World Heritage Cultural Center is proud to offer free English (ESL) classes twice a week, free to the public. Languages being taught by WHCC professionals are of beginners, intermediate, and advanced levels. Some of the classes being taught at the center are the following: English, Hindi, Spanish, Dutch, Eqyptian, German, French, Greek, Albanian, Italian, Portugese, Mandarin, Japanese, Chinese, Javanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Bengali, Thai, Tamil, Turkish(we will add more languages as demands grow).

Between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, ancient civilizations made the discovery that ideas could be represented by standard symbols that could be written down, painted on a surface, or pressed into wet clay. The Sumerians used a stick whose cross section had either three or four sides to write their cuneiform letters on moist clay tablets that were later baked.

Later, the Egyptians and Greeks used a mallet and chisel to write on stone and a reed pen to write on papyrus and specially scraped and prepared cow and sheep skins. Hieroglyphs were pictorial symbols of objects and animals from the Egyptian's everyday life. They were often richly detailed and painted by the writer. It was important to the Egyptians that their written language was beautiful and the symbols were grouped in an arrangement pleasing to the eye. Their order was quite flexible and they could be read from right to left, left to right, and from top to bottom. The Greeks inherited their alphabet from one brought to their islands by Phoenician traders.

By this time, many of the letters they used were ones we would recognize today and some even had the same sounds associated with them. The Roman alphabet was derived largely from the Greek and was almost the same as the one we use today.


Forms of creative writing offered at the Center :

Short story - refers to a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, usually in narrative format.

Novel - is today a long narrative in literary prose, a genre with historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance

Epic - an epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation

Poetry - is a form of literary art in

Screenwriting - is the art and craft of writing scripts for film and television.

Playwriting/Dramatic writing - A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama.

Autobiography/Memoir - is a biography written by its subject (or sometimes, in modern usage, composed conjointly with a collaborative writer).

Creative non-fiction (Personal & Journalistic Essays) - is a genre of writing which uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives.

Flash fiction - is fiction of extreme brevity. The standard, generally-accepted length of a flash fiction piece is 1000 words or less.

Collaborative writing - The term collaborative writing refers to projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually. Some projects are overseen by an editor or editorial team