Jul 20, 2016 / Blogging U.

Polish Your Prose in Our Newest Blogging U. Course

Learn to be your own best editor with this intermediate writing workshop.

We’re excited to tell you about the latest addition to the library of on-demand Blogging U. courses: please give a warm Daily Post welcome to Writing: Shaping Your Story!

Sound familiar? This course is based on the old Writing 201: Finding Your Story course.

Shaping Your Story is a four-week, intermediate/advanced-level course focused on editing and sharpening your writing. You’ll learn to identify a post’s unique angle, craft compelling introductions, pinpoint your story’s key moments, and build those moments out into rich scenes. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, Shaping Your Story helps you focus and refine your work.

Since Shaping Your Story takes you into writing and editing techniques in depth, it’s structured a little differently than other Blogging U. courses:

  • There are no daily assignments.
  • You’ll get one email each week with an overview of the week’s topic — Angles, Introductions, Key Moments, and Scenes — and a series of questions you can use to review that aspect of your writing. Each email also links you to the course’s resource page, where you’ll find fuller explanations, more tips, and advice from some of our favorite writers.
  • You experiment with our tips and techniques in your posts, and decide how much time and effort you’d like to spend each day.
  • In between each larger topic, we’ll send you two additional short emails — quotes from authors we love, passages from great books and articles, bonus techniques for picking apart your writing — to keep you motivated and inspired.

What you publish, and how much, is entirely up to you.

Ready to get started? Head to the course page, and click the “Start” button — you’ll get a welcome note immediately, and the first week’s materials ten minutes later.

Show Comments

24 Comments

Comments are closed.

Close Comments

Comments

  2. I’ve been a professional writer for years, but appreciate this course and will sign up. We can all be polishing our craft, not matter how long we’ve been at it. Thanks so much, Michelle.

    Liked by 4 people

  3. I have always wanted to get down to writing for years but have been to lazy to try. Let me check this out hope it will get me off my bum and start writing my ideas.

    Liked by 3 people

  7. wow. sounds terrific. wordpress is such a wonderful resource. thanks so much for yet another educational course to hone our skills in creating words and pictures. i’ll sign up, even though i’m a professional writer. can always learn new things about the craft of writing.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. Will there be a common room for all the students who are part of the course. I miss that part in the Blogging U. That part actually encourages and helps a lot because there’s an interaction between other bloggers. Taking the course alone feels lonely sometimes, but the tips and lessons are very helpful. I just miss that common room for interaction. 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

    1. All Blogging U. courses are now on-demand and email-only; we encourage folks in each course to use the course’s tag on their posts and to visit that tag in the Reader to find and connect with other participants directly.

      Liked by 1 person

  14. Hello! Sorry for the bother but I signed up for the Blogging: Fundamentals course 3 days ago and so far I have received nothing. 😦 I haven’t received the welcome email or the first assignments, why is this?
    I hope you take the time to reply, thanks ^^

    Like