Improve your writing style

Everyone writes. However, many of us are nervous about how our writing comes across to readers.

Is my writing style unique and noticeable, so that a potential employer will notice it fast? Will my sentences "sound good" if I have to write a feature article or newsletter? And how to express a complex idea--or describe an event or setting--so that readers will feel it keenly, as if it were their own thought?

I don't believe that some people have a writing "voice" and others don't. I believe, instead, that there are techniques everyone can learn and practise that will markedly improve their command of written English. And as your skills at writing improves, so does your ability to closely observe the real world, to formulate arguments, to enjoy and appreciate the prose of others.

In these sessions, I will teach some very powerful techniques used by famous authors: the cumulative sentence, the periodic sentence, rhythm, noun versus verb style, and others. We will see these methods at work in published fiction, memoirs, and essays, and we will practise them in class and for homework.

It isn't specifically a grammar course, but you will pick up some of the finer principles of grammar by doing, instinctively.

My aim, over even a few lessons, is to show you how to go on learning by yourself, to give you a road map for continuing improvement.