Exploring Prose: The wit and satire of Walter Kirn

Welcome to Prose Mechanics, a new approach that works with maturing writers to develop thier style and voice.

To grow as skilled writers, we take it as self evident that the best way to "learn to write sound, interesting and sometimes elegant prose is to read the best writing available with keen attention and make use of it in our own writing". This we will do.

In our workshops, we use a wide array of intuitive exercises to explore the texture and mechanics of beautiful, well written sentences - their flow, their rhythm, their structure and cadence. In turn, we bring this improved understanding to our own writing, improving our style and giving our thoughts, insights, and creativity the rhetorical power they deserve through the medium we love: the humble, but powerful, English sentence.

This week we will explore the prose style of Walter Kirn, American essayist, novelist, and literary critic.

We will explore his rightly famous essay, Lost in the Meritocracy from The Atlantic Monthly.

By better appreciating the syntactic choices Kirn makes, we will better understand how Kirn builds rhythm and cadence, to create prose with heightened insight, humor and rhetorical power.

I strongly recommend reading the essay. It's worth it.

The Essay: Lost in The Meritocracy, The Atlantic Monthly
Location: Raw Coffee Company, Al Quoz

Past Students of Prose Mechanics:

Sunna G. - Graduate of American University in Dubai

It was one of the best workshops that I have ever done. It was an absolute pleasure and I learned a lot. The classes were always well-structured, engaging, and top-notch. Highly recomment it!

Naheed Malik - Found of the Loop, P.R. Company

As always, useful, interesting, and invigorating, sort of like a gym session for your brain, where you write, discuss, learn, and improve your writing.

Ibrahim Mohammed, Phd., University of Guelph

I thought writing was all about content. David changed this perception. After completing David’s course, Prose Mechanics: Style through Syntax, I see writing differently. Gone are the days when I read for content. Now I read paying attention to the choices the writer makes in each sentence. Now I see writing as art, as a puzzle that can be deconstructed and assembled, as a dance that can change in cadence and speed, as a substance with
texture, and a structure that can be modified.

Khalid Asser - AUD Graduate

I gained a system oriented approach to literature - an analytic method of reading and writing. It was creative and cleverly constructed to be adaptive to our (the students’) existing thought, rather than completely new. There was clearly a great deal of effort put into the research and organization of the course material, and that’s without
mentioning the mentoring, support, as well as extra effort and time that the instructor willingly and so generously provided to each one of us.