"Write What?" addendum #1: writing and editing courses in Singapore

On Friday night, at the invitation of Six Degrees, I gave an informal talk "Write What --- Freelance writing opportunities in the Singapore market", during which I maundered about:

• Different types of freelance writing work.
• Looking beyond the obvious employers/clients.
• How clients select freelancers.
• Getting started as a new writer.

Some of the interesting questions that were raised during and after the session were the kind that are best answered with web links, so here's the first of perhaps several follow-up posts I'll try to put up.

Question: What kinds of writing and editing courses are out there in Singapore?

The ones I'm aware of (and I'm restricting the list to non-creative writing courses here):

• The Centre for Literary Arts and Publishing (which has the unfortunate acronym CLAP), which is the training arm of the National Book Development Council of Singapore. The latter also has an online database of Singapore writers (though I'm not listed --- note to self: find out how to get listed).
  
• The British Council, which offers writing programmes as part of their corporate training line-up. More interesting for some might be the British Council Arts Singapore Facebook page, which has writing events as well as other arts-related programming.
• The Singapore Book Publishers Association runs various training courses and also has an online directory of freelancers (though I've never tried to get myself listed there).
• The Magazine Publishers Association of Singapore also seems to offer courses.
• The Institute of Advertising Singapore has courses on copywriting, though the website doesn't have any course dates for 2010.

Of the above, I've only ever interacted with the National Book Development Council of Singapore. They organised a very useful and well-attended talk by American literary agent Kelly Sonack last year, and way back in 2003 I attended an editing course run by their Centre for Literary Arts and Publishing. Both were excellent, truly, but as with most of these things, it really depends on who the trainer is and what their professional experience (and presentation/teaching skills) are like.

Besides getting information directly from associations and companies themselves, there are also heaps of mailing lists and writers' groups out there (though no one definitive writers' community/network). More about that in the next post.

Edited to add (11:34 p.m.):
If you've come across other writing or editing courses in Singapore, please feel free to add them in the comments. (This is the one of the few times I'll allow commercial solicitations on my blog.)