Making the Prose Sing
A one or two-day workshop (adaptable) on wordiness
Description: This workshop teaches writers what to do when the prose just won't sing. It focuses on how to recognize the problem (weak verbs, too great a reliance on nouns, imprecise vocabulary, repetition, redundancy of ideas, vagueness, etc.) and how to fix it. Excellent for writers of all levels and all genres.
Method: Intense manuscript work and some exploratory exercises
Genre: Applicable to all prose writing
Connecting the Prose and the Passion
"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted." - E. M. Forster
A one-day or two-day workshop (adaptable)
Description: How can we use language to say exactly what we mean? How can we strengthen the emotional impact of our writing or create suspense or speak more forcefully or more gently? How can we make our prose more rhythmic, more humorous, more luminous?
This workshop helps writers sharpen their sensitivity to the sound and the sense, the private intimacy and the communal rhythms of the words we choose to use for the muse.
Genre: Applicable to all writing: personal essay, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journals
Method: Class exercises focus on word choice, sentence variety, elimination of wordiness, and other elements of good prose. Writers will stretch outside their normal writing styles in order to experience the marvelously elastic tool of language.
For all levels.
(Also adaptable as a nature-writing workshop, entitled Putting Words in Her Mouth:
How to Use Language to Give a Voice to Nature, Our Muse)
Word Wizardry (for adults)
A one-week writing workshop to develop creative play with language
Description: How can we strengthen the emotional impact of our writing or create suspense or speak more forcefully or more gently? How can we make our prose more rhythmic, more humorous, more luminous? What happens when our writing is weighted with nouns or when adjectives metamorphose into metaphors or weak verbs are defenestrated? How do Latinate or Anglo-Saxon words affect our tone? If concise is good, is shortest best? How can we use language to say exactly what we mean?
Using inclass freewriting exercises or student manuscripts, we will discover how to make words work for us by finding out just exactly how they work, from their sound to their sense, from their private intimacies to their communal rhythms. At the beginning of the class, students will make a simple handbound book; at the end of each day, they will write a piece for inclusion in this book. At the end of the course, the books will be both a record of the lessons learned and a testimony to the value of good prose.
Day one: The writer's tools (vocabulary, metaphor, alliteration, allusion, sensory images, narrative, comparison, etc.)
Day two: Making those verbs sing and dance!
Day three: Turning what's vague and general into something specific
Day four: Finding metaphors and other kinds of images; avoiding cliches
Day five: Using parallel structure and other rhetorical devices
Day six: Putting it all together - eliminating wordiness (repetition of word and of idea, what's unnecessary, what's vague, what's meaningless)
Gold Digging: Finding the Details in the Depths
Nothing enhances writing better than attention to details, but what seems
to be a detail in the first draft might have a gold mine of details
deep within it. In this workshop writer Diana Coogle sends us on a
dig in the gold mine. Join this workshop and come away rich with understanding
how to dig out the details that give your writing emotional impact
and make it shine with individuality.
Unmistakably You: Developing a Distinct Voice
1 1/2 hours
What makes a writer's style uniquely his or her own? How might you develop such a strong voice that readers will say, "Ah. Unmistakably [your name]"? In this workshop participants play with various elements of style to see how they fit their individual voices - vocabulary, sentence length, tone, sentence construction, metaphors, clichés, and so forth.
Capturing in Words the World As You See It
6 hours
In this workshop, writer and public radio commentator Diana Coogle explores the rich possibilities of the personal essay. Participants will look at how to fit the topic to the rhetorical modes (descriptive, narrative, process, etc.), what kinds of organizational pattern to use, how to write effective introductions and conclusions, and how to create emotional impact. This "hands-on" class begins with a brief overview of the essay as a literary genre and uses writing exercises, partner work, and language games to explore the topics.
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