My teaching has its origins in a monogram I started working on and self-published in 2007 and subsequently revised multiple times: Before we begin: Notes on the editing and proofreading of papers, theses and related work.

At around 14 A4 pages, it mainly addressed what an author can do to make a document editing-ready. I then began to get requests to do workshops on sentence structure, paraphrasing, summarising, style, usage and so on.

My teaching goal is to expand your experience of English. As Hal Crane noted, “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment”.

Depending on your interests, we can look at, for instance:

• How to write paragraphs, paraphrase and summarise.
• How many errors are acceptable in a text?
• Setting time and word count goals in writing assignments.
• Gertrude Stein, joy, and writing as thinking in flow.
• Abstracts 2.0: Do your abstracts sing?
• The active and the passive voice.
• Some differences between UK and U.S. English.
• The two most important styles in any language – the plain style and the classic style.
• Jargon, garbage language and the weaponisation of English.
• Is English an ocean, a puzzle, a dance, a bridge, a toolbox, a symphony, a magic carpet, a web, a garden, a roadmap or a treasure chest? Or is it something else?
• Stephen King’s On writing: A memoir of the craft.
• Steven Pinker’s The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century.
• Stanley Fish’s How to write a sentence and how to read one.

Keen to dive in? The sooner you contact me, the sooner I can assist you…