What is the Wordcraft Catalyst?

Across six weeks of writing workshops, experiments, and prompts, Helen will introduce you to key features of precise, nuanced prose — vivid verbs, concrete nouns, punchy prepositions, edgy ad-words, clutter-free phrases, and shapely syntax — and work with you to transform your writing from soggy to solid, from flabby to fit, from cloudy to clear!

Weeks 1-6: Weekly Workshops

Every Saturday morning from April 6 - May 11, you’ll receive an email with a link to the Wordcraft Catalyst theme and materials for the upcoming week. We recommend that you budget at least one hour per week (or more if you wish!) to complete your tasks for each module.

• Week 1: Vivify your verbs

• Week 2: Zap your zombies

• Week 3: Pep up your preps

• Week 3: Address your ad-dictions

• Week 5: Clear out your clutterbugs

• Week 6: Sharpen your syntax

On Wednesday mornings, you’ll receive an email prompting you to reflect on the week's activities and recalibrate your goals for the weeks ahead.

Every week: Join Helen and other writers from around the globe for Live Writing Studio sessions themed to coordinate with each module. Check our guest calendar to see the timing of these twice-weekly sessions displayed in your own time zone.

Meet your facilitator

Greetings! I’m Helen Sword — a scholar, poet, teacher, and the author of four research-based books on writing and writers, including Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard 2012) and The Writer’s Diet (Chicago 2016).

I’ve spent the past two decades helping academic and professional writers shape up their sentences and find joy and satisfaction in wordcraft — and I’d love to help you, too!

This course will empower you to build a craft-focused writing practice grounded in pleasure rather than pain, in joy rather than self-judgment, based on research-informed principles that really work. Let’s get started!

write with precision

At last, you’ll truly understand — and know how to explain to others — how sentences work, why some words and phrases sound more engaging than others, and what simple interventions will make the biggest difference to your writing.

write with panache

No more serpentine sentences and formulaic phrasings! You’ll be able send your words out into the world with confidence, knowing that your readers will respond with delight to your clear, concise, beautifully crafted prose.

write with pleasure

Here’s a secret no one teaches you in graduate school: productivity and pleasure walk hand in hand. Set yourself up for scholarly success by shifting your perspective on writing from a painful chore to a pleasurable challenge.

1. Vivify your verbs

Warm up your writing muscles with this module on static statives, pesky passives, and vivid, vivacious active verbs.

2. Zap your zombies

Rescue your writing from the zombie noun apocalypse by transforming lumbering academic abstractions into people, places, and things.

3. Pep up your preps

Add directional energy with punchy prepositional phrases that take you reader somewhere new rather than tying them up in knots.

4. Address your ad-dictions

Temper the temptations of over-egged adjectives and egregious adverbs — but embrace the pleasures of writing Eeyorishly from time to time.

5. Clear out your clutterbugs

Spring-clean your sentences by sweeping away space-clogging, zombie-adjacent clutterbugs such as it, this, that, and there.

6. Sharpen your syntax

Fine-tune your prose style by attending to the nuances of grammar, punctuation, syntax, and the neuropsychology of sentence structure.