Developing Structure and Style in a Personal Essay with Matt Ortile

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Editor's Note

Developing Structure and Style in a Personal Essay with Matt Ortile
Saturday, April 4
9 AM – 12 PM PT/ 12 PM – 3 PM ET
Online

In this seminar and generative workshop, students will learn foundational elements of structure and style in a personal essay. We will study the anatomy of an essay in class, and practice with writing tools that can shape our ideas into coherent narratives and lead to a first draft.

When we write personal essays, we can define ‘structure’ as how we organize our story, and ‘style’ as how we tell that story. Put another way: the former can be called ‘shape,’ and the latter ‘texture.’ A strong sense of both must be present in our prose to minimize the gap between what we mean to say and what the reader takes away from our writing—or, at the very least, write something coherent and understandable. The craft techniques we will learn in class (the two-turns structure, the ladder of abstraction, “braiding,” etc.) are not the end-all-be-all methods of personal essay writing, but they will be handy tools in your repertoire when drafting and editing.

This class is for writers of all levels. The class is composed of short lectures, generative exercises, and open discussions about structure, style, and how to braid the two in our writing. We will also review readings from Roy Peter Clark, Jane Hu, Aldous Huxley, Helen Rosner, and Jess Zimmerman. Students will leave the class with a potential structure/outline for a personal essay, plus a stylistic tool kit to improve their essayistic prose and communication skills. We will end with a short Q&A, time permitting.

Scholarship
The scholarship for this intensive has already been awarded.

BIO: Matt Ortile is the author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name and the co-editor of the nonfiction anthology Body Language. He is an editor at Condé Nast Traveler, and was previously the executive editor of Catapult magazine and the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. He has written for Esquire, Vogue, Out, Self, BuzzFeed News, and elsewhere; has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and MacDowell; and has taught creative writing classes at Kundiman, PEN America, the Center for Fiction, and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He is a graduate of Vassar College, which means he now lives in Brooklyn.