Exploring Prose: The Wit and Satire of Walter Kern


Details
Welcome to Prose Mechanics, a new approach that works with maturing writers to develop their 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, yet powerful, English sentence.
This week we will explore the prose style of Walter Kirn, American essayist, novelist, and literary critic. We will look at, in his rightly famous essay, “Lost in the Meritocracy”, the syntactic choices Kirn makes to build rhythm and cadence, creating a prose style with heightened insight, humor, and rhetorical power and, as we notice more, gain insights we can take back to our own writing.
I strongly recommend reading the essay. It's worth it.
The Essay: Lost in The Meritocracy, The Atlantic Monthly
The meeting is on-line:
Meeting ID: 837 4857 7216
Passcode: 754744
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 recommend it!
Naheed Malik - Founder 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, Ph.D., 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 only for content. Now I read by 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, giving the words on the page a texture, a rhythm, a grace that I never truly noticed before.
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.

Exploring Prose: The Wit and Satire of Walter Kern