This final-year module integrates English language, literature, and creative writing to prepare you for life beyond university, blending academic study with practical skill development and career-focused applications. You will refine your expertise in linguistic analysis, critical interpretation, and creative expression, while exploring how these core skills translate into diverse professional environments.

Through engaging with a wide range of texts—from classic literature to contemporary media—you will deepen your understanding of storytelling, language use, and audience engagement. Creative writing workshops will encourage the development of original, polished works, while employability-focused sessions will highlight transferable skills such as communication, research, editing, and project management.

The module includes practical tasks like producing professional portfolios, writing for public audiences, and exploring roles in industries such as publishing, education, media, and heritage. Insight from industry professionals will provide information about career opportunities, and you will be encouraged to reflect on your academic experiences to articulate your strengths in professional contexts. Knowledge from Level 5 core and specialist modules will be consolidated, extended and contextualised in terms of the relationship between your academic studies and the developments of transferable skills valued in a range of modern workplaces.

By combining advanced study with hands-on practice, this module equips you with the tools and confidence to excel in the workplace, demonstrating the value and versatility of an English degree.

This self-directed module allows students to initiate and develop their own major project ideas appropriate to their discipline of study. Students at this point in their studies are often very focussed on their ultimate work aspirations, and this module helps them to gain 'graduate trajectory' to enable them to better move into their chosen profession as seamlessly as possible when they have finished their studies.

This module focuses on varied and exciting examples of ‘genre fiction’. Module content may include a number of the following: detective fiction, science fiction, the gothic, fantasy, historical fiction, horror, the thriller and young adult fiction. The module will typically explore such questions as: the definition and complexity of ‘genre’, notions of canonicity and distinctions between the ‘popular’ and ‘literary’. It will also consider how genre fiction reflects, interrogates and interacts with broader social and cultural movements and events.

This module is an exciting exploration of a range of contemporary texts, which can include flash fictions (short-short stories) and poems in magazines and collections, ‘literary’ novels and ‘popular’ novels, award-winning plays and best-selling plays, and less traditional ‘publications’ on websites and social media. A wide range of issues may be discussed, including literary judgements (for example, why a work was deemed worthy of a national prize) and how ‘success’ might be defined. Further to enhancing your analytical reading skills, you will develop a more nuanced understanding of the difference between critical opinion and personal opinion.

This module explores the intersection of linguistics and the law, providing you with the skills and knowledge to analyse language as forensic evidence. Combining speech and phonetic analysis with corpus-based approaches to authorship, the module examines how linguistic expertise can contribute to criminal investigations and legal contexts.

You will investigate real-world case studies to understand how phonetics can be used to identify speakers, analyse accents, and detect deception in spoken evidence. You will also learn how corpus linguistic techniques uncover patterns in written texts to assess authorship, detect plagiarism, and analyse disputed documents. Practical sessions will involve working with speech analysis software such as PRAAT and corpus tools such as AntConc, WordSmith and Wmatrix to apply theoretical insights to forensic problems.

Key topics may include voice profiling, speaker verification, the stylistic fingerprint of individual authors, the use of linguistic evidence in court, and the ethical and methodological challenges of forensic linguistic work. 

By blending theoretical frameworks with hands-on analysis, this module equips you with transferable skills in linguistic research and forensic applications, preparing you for careers in linguistics, criminology, law enforcement, or further academic study.

This module explores the dynamic relationship between discourse, society, and the media. It examines how communication shapes and is shaped by social structures, cultural norms, and media practices. The ways in which traditional and digital media construct social realities through language, visual representation, and narrative will be explored. It also considers a range of controversies about language that are frequently discussed in a range of media discourses, such as language regulation and the role of global English. You will draw on critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and cultural theories to critically analyse the role of discourse in influencing public opinion, identity formation, political power, and social change.

You will engage with key concepts such as agenda-setting, representation, and the relationships between discourse and identity. The module covers a range of media platforms, including news outlets, social media, advertising, and entertainment, considering both historical and contemporary, national and local contexts. You will critically assess the intersection of media practices with issues like inequality, globalisation, activism, and public policy, while also exploring how media discourses reflect, perpetuate and challenge societal values.

The module encourages you to apply theoretical frameworks to real-world examples, helping you to develop a critical understanding of how media texts construct meanings and influence societal norms. Through lectures, readings, case studies, and practical analysis, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of how discourse shapes public understanding and vice versa, preparing you for careers in media, communication, social research, or any field that involves the study of public discourse and its societal impact.

This module is designed to give you a detailed understanding of the process of planning, writing and editing a novel. You will consider issues such as character, setting, story, plot and genre. In seminars, you will present your own writing for workshopping with a view to producing the opening chapter(s) of your novel. You will also learn about approaching literary agents and publishers.