LitFest 2025 Workshop: Crafting Superb Sentences, with Julie Sedivy

Item details

Date

Saturday, Oct 18, 2025 12:00p.m.

Location

EPL - Stanley A. Milner

Name

LitFest 2025 Workshop: Crafting Superb Sentences, with Julie Sedivy

Description

Sentences are the foundation of all writing, and mastering the sentence is essential to developing a strong writing voice. In this workshop, I would bring in gorgeous, surprising, intriguing, devastating sentences from a variety of genres, including romance, sci-fi, fantasy, young adult and children’s books, in addition to more traditional literary genres. I would discuss what makes a wonderful opening sentence, what kinds of final sentences leave the reader satisfied while also keeping the work alive in the mind. We would talk about sentence structure, how it can be exploited to create pacing or heighten certain emotions, and how varying the structure of sentences can make a passage more interesting or beautiful. We would discuss how some parts of the sentence highlight information more than others, much like throwing a spotlight on some of the content, making that portion of the sentence especially memorable. Or how certain devices subtly allude to background information that the reader can quickly construct, without bogging the prose down with boring exposition. I would begin the session by having participants free-write a short passage, and then we would play with various structures and devices to alter their original sentences and observe the effects. This interactive workshop would have very broad appeal for writers across genres, and would be useful for beginning and advanced writers alike. 

JULIE SEDIVY is a writer and linguist whose work straddles scientific and literary worlds. Her book Memory Speaks (Harvard University Press) was shortlisted for two Alberta Literary Awards and was named by The Economist as one of the top five books about language in a “golden age” of language writing. She has contributed writing to outlets such as Nautilus, Discover, Scientific American, the Literary Review of Canada, LA Review of Books, EuropeNow, Aeon + Psyche, and Politico. She is the co-editor (with Rona Altrows) of Waiting, a collection of personal essays (University of Alberta Press), and the co-author (with Souad Shehab) of Ayah and the Big World Outside, a forthcoming children’s book to be published by Orca Books in 2026. Her most recent book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was named by The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2024 and won the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. Julie is a citizen of three countries. 

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