🗓️ START DATE
Thursday, January 2, 2025

🕜 TIME
Every Thursday, 7–8:30 pm ET

✍️ GROUP DETAILS
To write gorgeous sentences, you could post up at the bar with your laptop, drink an old fashioned, and pray the writing muse shows up. Nothing wrong with that.

But there’s a more reliable approach:

Comedians watch stand-up to study timing and tone. Footballers analyze game footage to perfect their plays. To sharpen their craft, writers study masterful sentences.

In this 6-week group, we’ll take a magnifying glass to the sentences of American author Lorrie Moore and do some exercises to cement what we discover about her work.

Each week, over an hour-long call, we’ll discuss a different story of Lorrie’s along with her choices when it comes to:

• GRAMMAR AND STYLE: How she follows—and breaks—conventional rules.

• SYNTAX: The distinctive patterns in her sentence structures.

• RHETORICAL DEVICES: Techniques she’s using that are probably familiar to you, like metaphor and irony, plus some lesser-known devices.

(By November 1, I’ll post which stories we’ll be studying, right here.)

This group isn’t about copying Lorrie Moore’s style. It’s about discovering your own voice, whether you’re writing stories or copy. Not everyone connects with the same techniques. The goal is to identify specific techniques of Lorrie’s that give you chills or make you smile—then adopt, riff off, or even subvert them.

To craft sentences that are distinctly you.