Last Updated on March, 2025
Various writing specializations exist because you need different communication styles to approach different audiences. Imagine the disaster of writing a business proposal guided by your creative or songwriting skills.
Each writing specialization represents a sense of professionalism for the respective field. Mastering different skills based on the field you are in or want to get into will help your work to flow more smoothly.
So here’s a list of free online writing classess categorized into several writing specializations. You will find the class you are looking for in our reviews below.
Quick Summary
There are a variety of free online writing classes available for different writing specializations.
Skillshare is a platform offering a wide range of writing classes but requires an annual subscription.
Practicing and making the best use of course materials are essential for improving writing skills.
Reviews of Top Free Online Writing Classes
1. Copywriting
If you want to write words and texts to persuade your reader, this class is what you seek.
The Basic Concepts And Techniques For Copywriting course Alison offers is specially created for those wanting to start in the copywriting field and those already in marketing/ copywriting roles.
You don’t need foundation knowledge to follow this online writing course.
This course teaches you persuasive writing skills to craft compelling and engaging marketing copies in whatever capacity you desire.
This writing course is structured into 3 modules where you will learn essential concepts and see how it is applied in real-world scenarios.
In addition, Writing Ad Copy, an intermediate-level online writing course offered by LinkedIn, will be helpful for those who want to transition into a specialization in marketing or advertising.
This course covers significant areas like rules of writing ad copies for different platforms, changing message and tone based on target audience and personality, creating ad copies to effectively convey the brand and increase traffic converting into sales and do’s and don’ts on ad copywriting.
The course also entails a section briefing the future of copywriters in advertising. You can try this 59 minutes long online writing course by taking advantage of LinkedIn’s 1-month free trial.
2. Creative Writing
If you are looking for free creative writing courses, check out the beginner-level Creative Writing Specialization course. Wesleyan University offers this free writing course through the Coursera online learning platform.
This free online writing course suits anyone from aspiring short story writers to well-established novelists. This course will teach you the techniques required to create a memorable story, as any good creative writer does.
This online creative writing course includes three essential elements of creative writing genres: short story, memoir and narrative essay. The course covers critical topics like the craft of plot, the craft of character, setting and description and craft of style.
Through this course, you will learn how to keep the story moving, how your writing can manipulate the reader’s feelings, expectations and desires, and the choices storytellers make to grab the reader’s imagination, creating a fictional world and keeping the readers sucked into.
This writing course is structured into HD-quality video lessons, practice quizzes, graded assignments with peer feedback, quizzes with feedback and programming assignments to facilitate self-paced learning for all students.
3. Impactful Writing
LinkedIn offers an intermediate-level free online writing course for those looking to write impactful pieces. The Writing With Impact course will help you convert your basic writing to the next level, regardless of the purpose and intended audience.
The key topics covered in this free online writing class include the meaning of writing with impact, learning about your readers, understanding how people read and how to write short, clearly and right.
The course instructor, Tom Geller, a writer/ journalist, will help you figure out why you are writing. For these reasons, he will teach you how to write by choosing a suitable tone and impactful words to structure your writing.
This 1-hour online writing course comprises 19 video lessons classed into 6 chapters. And each of these chapters comes with a short quiz that will help you test your knowledge of the content you learned.
You can also check out the Secret Sauce of Great writing course. This online writing course accessible through Udemy explores 4 essential concepts of good writing: simplicity, clarity, elegance and evocativeness.
The course will guide you to use these concepts in your writing skillfully.
This class addresses a range of topics, including the secret sauce of flair, the four crucial ingredients, how the instructor discovered the sauce, the power of simplicity and exercises, the power of clarity and exercises, the power of elegance and exercises, and the power of evocativeness and exercises.
This 1-hour short course is a composition of 14-on-demand videos. At the end of this course, you will learn how to write a powerful and impactful piece. You will also learn to identify your weaknesses and correct them to improve significantly.
4. Essay/Academic Writing
Suppose you are a student looking to polish your essay writing to produce top-notch academic assignments, projects or a thesis. In that case, you will find a free online writing class in this section to help nurture your academic writing skills.
The How To Write An Essay class by the University of California, Berkeley, introduces academic writing. This free online course focuses on essay development, grammatical correctness and self-editing.
By following this course on the EdX platform, you can learn basic grammar terminology and understanding, how to write effective sentences and paragraphs, tackle writing introductions and conclusions, and strategies to write long texts and statements.
The 5-week long course allows self-paced learning through videos and reading materials. You can also go for the optional course e-workbook for additional writing work.
This writing class aims to get students to complete an essay, which is then put up for online discussions and peer review.
You can also check out the Essay Essentials: Improve Your Academic Writing offered by Udemy. This online class will help you learn and practice essential writing skills step-by-step.
This class covers many essential topics, including understanding how the writing situation, process and classroom resources impact you, brainstorming and creating ideas to develop an essay, developing and structuring introduction and conclusion paragraphs, writing a clear, specific, and well-connected thesis, understanding the organization of essay paragraphs and many more.
This free online class is a 1 hour 14 minutes on-demand video class.
5. Business Writing
Yes, there is a particular style of writing you should follow if you expect to present your writing to a business-related audience. You know, like writing a proposal or research summaries.
Business Writing Techniques is a free writing course offered by Doane University and is available through the EdX platform. This course teaches you the art of professional writing required in the business world.
This online writing course covers the different communication styles, etiquettes in business writing and best practices for modern business writing. This course targets the improvement of business message writing through the 6 C’s.
This 4-week long free writing course. It is set to be followed at your own pace by spending around 5-8 hours per week; you can go through the entire course.
6. Journalist Writing
Journalism is a tough field to be in. Because the audience is the general population itself. And as a part of the general population, I believe journalism writing should be PERFECT. Here’s what you can check out on journalism to cultivate your English writing skills.
For those looking to kick-start in this field, you can start with the Become A Journalist: Report The News! Specialization class.
This course is made available through Coursera by Michigan State University. This course will give you an understanding of the global field of journalism to help you launch your career.
Through this course, you can expect to learn the best practices and ethical standards of news gathering and compiling reports, journalism’s impact on societal issues and trends, and explore career opportunities in the magazine, social media, Internet multimedia, television, radio, corporate and community journalism.
This online class works on hands-on projects, peer-to-peer reviews, and issue exploration methods. This course will take approximately 6- months for you to finish.
The final assessment component of this class takes you through a journalistic portfolio process to help you conceptualize, report and complete a professional quality report.
Another course available on the EdX platform for journalistic writing is English For Journalists, Part 1. Created by the University of California, Berkeley, this class is focused on nurturing grammar, vocabulary and writing skills through exciting topics in journalism and world news.
The class covers essential topics like a journalist’s job, ethics in journalism, inclusivity, local vs global journalism and citizen journalism. By studying these topics, you can understand the current issues journalists face, improve vocabulary and grammar to write effective stories and improve your communications skills for interviews and reports.
This free online class is a 5-week self-paced course which requires around 3-4 hours of your time per week.
7. Song Writing
That’s right! Although you can write whatever you want to cook up a song, following a course like Songwriting: Writing the Lyric offered by the Berklee College of Music will definitely help up your game.
The free online writing class will guide you to explore an effective and efficient way of reflecting your ideas and emotions onto your creative process of writing a song. This will help you take control and approach the process differently.
This online class is focused on both lyrical and musical aspects. Over the course duration, you will create lyrics and/or melodies which you can share for peer review.
8. Visual Writing
Passionate about stirring up some serious drama?
The arts and entertainment industry means engaging and interesting stories. And to write engaging stories, you need to learn basic concepts and writing styles for dramatic writing.
Write A Feature Length Screenplay For Film Or Television is a beginner-level free online class for those passionate about writing a movie script. Available on Coursera, this course is offered by Michigan State University.
This screenplay writing course will guide you to break down the creative writing process into segments to help you develop a polished and pitch-ready script.
Including many topics like creating the idea, logline and dramatic question, creating your character profile, beginning the screenplay, writing the final section and more, this course taps into your creativity to set the background.
This course is set up on ‘active learning’. Like how it’s done in the real world, through the peer review process, you’ll feel like you are in a room full of professional writers who can share and receive feedback on your work.
Building your screenplay is another screenwriting course by the University of Cambridge. This course will broaden you on how to become a professional screenplay writer.
You can learn to become a powerful storyteller, build an effective structure within your screenplay and develop professionally transferable communication skills and writing skills and much more by following this course.
9. Technical Writing
Technical writing is important to clearly convey certain concepts or processes. Good technical writing will break down complex ideas into easy-to-understand explanations.
And that’s what you’ll learn by following the Technical Writing Essentials online class available on Alison.
By following this class, you can learn the main conventions and characteristics of technical writing, the complex nature of the writing process, and the importance of knowing the audience and writing to cater to said audiences.
This free online writing class is set up on 33 video lessons classed into 6 modules. Within just 3 hours of viewing time, you can complete the course.
10. Freelance Writing
The Complete Freelance Writing course available on Udemy is a broad set-up writing course for those who want to become freelance writers.
Through this course, you can learn different writing styles intended for different audiences, best practices for blog writing, screenwriting to tell a compelling story, methods to employ to stay productive as a writer, grant writing and many more on becoming a freelance writer.
Now I know Skillshare is not a platform offering free online courses. You require an annual subscription to access their massive library of 35,000+ online courses.
But this humongous collection covers an extensive number of writing specializations so is sure to have many online courses you could benefit from.
So use Skillshare’s 30-day free trial to explore and access some of the online writing courses. It will be like following free writing courses for at least that month.
Most Skillshare courses are 30-minute long or short segmented lessons that won’t take up more than a day to finish. This gives you the opportunity to go through multiple online writing courses available on Skillshare before you exhaust the trial period.
Read my Skillshare experience if you want to know more about this platform.
Some of the online writing classes you can expect to find on Skillshare include the following;
- Editing and Proofreading
- Journalism 101:Introduction to News Writing
- Crafting Personal Essays With Impact
- Creative Writing Bootcamp: Start a Brand New Story
- Creating a Children’s Book
- Screenplay Writing
- Business Writing
- And much more to browse through
Trying out Skillshare for free will help you find out for yourself if it is worth paying for when the trial period is over.
Related article: Free Online Acting Classes
Frequently Asked Questions
Summary
The internet will flood you with many options for free online classes, there is no shortage of that. But writing can only be improved with practice and MORE PRACTICE.
I have tried and covered a broad range of writing specializations. So I hope you find the class that you are looking for, and I hope you benefit from the class to improve your writing.
Also, make sure to make the best use of the course materials, whatever course you choose.
Keep working on your writing, and check out Skillshare to find more courses to keep developing your writing journey.
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