I once had a writing professor who only edited the first two paragraphs of everything we turned in and said, "continue in this way to the end."
In this workshop, we'll do something similar, looking at some sample paragraphs and exploring strategies to make the prose more muscular and concise. We'll think about various rhetorical methods, look at how the copy appears on the page, notice writing tics, and dig into the messy and recursive process of breaking up, shortening, or extending sentences while we watch out for redundancy and verb tense confusion. When we finish, hopefully we will have a better sense of how to "continue in this way to the end" of our own projects - and save ourselves some editing headaches in the process.
CHRISTINA CLANCY is the author of The Second Home, Shoulder Season, and The Snowbirds (out Feb. 4, 2025). Her stories and essays have appeared in The Sun Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, The Minnesota Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She lives in Madison.
