Learn with Garth
What is Style?
Online Class
Saturdays: June 6, 13, 20 / 1:00-2:30pm ET
One of my biggest frustrations about my MFA experience was how little we talked about style. Leading my own workshops, I’ve found that even very sophisticated writers often lack concepts and vocabulary to talk about style in anything but the vaguest terms. There are good reasons for this. A great style gives the sense of a whole life, a whole world, condensed to a voice; it’s one of the deepest mysteries in writing.
In this course, we’ll be as concrete as possible about that mystery. Over three 90-minute sessions, we’ll consider the elements that make for great style, reading short passages together to develop tools for meaningfully talking about diction, sentence structure, patterns of imagery and sound, and rhetorical figures. We'll consider a wide range of writers, from Henry James to Jenny Zhang, James Baldwin to Marilynne Robinson and Natalie Diaz. Each session will also include prompts to get you thinking about how to cultivate a richer sense of style in your own work.
Class Archive
Below, you’ll find recordings of select courses. Each class contains the original video lectures, as well as any supplemental chat transcripts and handouts.
After purchasing, you will have 60 days to access the course videos.
