IN PERSON Sentence Skills Clinic
FIRST WEDNESDAY OF THE MONTH
1-4pm | BEGINS July 5, 2023 (no session on October 2023)
Instructor: Laura Swart
PER SESSION
MEMBER PRICE: $60.00
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $80.00
FULL YEAR
MEMBER PRICE: $450.00
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $600
NOTE: Drop-ins are welcome and can pay in-person at the admin office. These are workshopping sessions. We encourage you to bring along your difficult sentences and paragraphs.
Sentences are the backbone of our craft—yet they create all kinds of grief. Why? Because syntax isn’t about right and wrong. There are rules, certainly—but then there is instinct, a sixth sense that guides us through an often-barren landscape of syntax and diction, punctuation and mechanics. In this course, we’ll discover how to write powerful sentences, concise sentences, sentences with beauty and rhythm and depth. We’ll cut out excesses—eliminating errors in the process—and create openings to delineate our weighty ideas. And then, in Paul Cezanne’s words, we’ll astonish Paris. Not with an apple—but with a sentence.
This three-hour workshop/clinic is open to all—no experience is necessary to appreciate beauty, to tinker with structures. Please bring a few sentences that you would like to work with.
This program takes place in person at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre in Calgary.
Laura Swart is a novelist, poet, and playwright. She has taught creative and critical writing to adults for over thirty years, encouraging students to find and raise their writing voices. Her humanitarian work around the world—most recently in Ethiopia and Ukraine—have shaped her thinking, her teaching, and her writing.
