Banish your anxiety about grammar and get you new tricks to make your sentences sing.
Six hours, a free book, bagels galore, and buckets of grammar. How can you resist? Whether you dream of being a social-media monarch, a literary lioness, or a tough lawyer—words, sentences, and stories are your currency. You cannot afford sloppy syntax. Connie will lead you through a series of hilarious exercises and prompts to perk up your writing in surprising ways. (We’ll use Connie’s Sin and Syntax as our guide, but dip also into her book on verbs, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.) You will stretch new muscles, ditch bad habits, and duke it out in a war of words. We’ll also talk about how to cultivate that most elusive of literary elements: the writer’s voice. This one-day workshop is perfect for writers of all genres who want to take their prose to the next level. No grammar competency required, but a sense of humor is a must.
Students completing this workshop will:
*learn the parts of speech—which ones to exploit, which ones to expunge
*discover the dynamics of a sentence—master the subject-predicate tango
*banish all fear of the semicolon (and other punctuation minefields)
*avoid, forevermore, the five biggest bonehead grammatical mistakes
*figure out the fuss over dangling participles
*play with pronouns—yes, pronouns—to explore POV and voice
Constance Hale has transformed “writing reference” shelves with her irreverent books on language—which are used in writing classes around the world. A former editor at Wired, Health, and the San Francisco Examiner, her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, Honolulu, and Smithsonian, among other publications. Her six books include the bestselling Sin and Syntax: How to Write Wicked Good Prose. Once called “E. B. White on acid,” Connie has directed creative nonfiction conferences at Harvard and U.C. Berkeley and wrote an eight-part series for “Draft” at the New York Times’ Opinionator. She covers writing and the writing life at sinandsyntax.com.