In Search of Style: Sound and Sentences

with Rumaan Alam

It’s hard to define style. But every writer—indeed every artist—has one. Style is more than a writer’s innate instinct with language; if style came naturally, there would be no need to revise, ever, though every writer must.

Several individual choices shape a writer’s style (and that style might evolve from project to project). This workshop will focus on two distinct but interrelated considerations: sound and the sentence. For sound, there is the question of narration, and dialogue, and thought; how are they conveyed on the page, and how does that contribute to the aims of the writer? For sentences, the perspective of grammar isn’t of interest but something deeper; how does the shaping of the individual, basic unit of text, the sentence itself, advance the aims of a text?

Rumaan Alam—author of four novels, including Entitlement and the National Book Award-nominated Leave the World Behind—will lead this intensive workshop exploring how attention to the small fundamentals of writing can yield radical new understandings of both a work in progress and a writer’s overall style.