teaching

Brett Oppegaard has been an active writing and journalism educator since earning his master's degree in communication from the University of Portland in 1999. He recently began work on his doctorate degree at Texas Tech University. His background includes more than 15 years of working in daily newspapers, which earned him numerous national, regional and state awards. As education opened new worlds for him, Oppegaard became devoted to passing on that knowledge.

He since has created several college courses from scratch, advised a couple of student publications and helped to build the foundation for journalism and ethics studies at Washington State University's branch campus in Vancouver, Wash. His classes have covered virtually every aspect of journalism. That has meant delving into all styles of nonfiction writing, from inverted pyramid to narrative to opinion to the most graphical techniques, such as charticles. His master's degree studies focused on narrative or literary nonfiction forms, which is his specialty. But he also has taught elements of page design, copy editing, photography, modern media delivery systems (blogging, podcasts, slideshows, web videos, etc.), interviewing, research of public documents and even advertising models.

At The Columbian, southern Washington's largest daily newspaper, where he spent 13 years as a staff writer, Oppegaard helped to found and lead a monthly writers group. He also was one of the industry's regional pioneers into multimedia enhancement of stories for the Web, producing early versions of podcasts and slideshows as well as audio and video productions.

To contact him about his availability as a consultant, teacher or writing coach, click here.