Last month, more than 4,000 bloggers joined us for Writing 101: Building a Blogging Habit, where they challenged themselves to carve out time to write regularly, and to experiment with new forms and styles. The result? Thousands of posts, comments, and follows, and countless new friendships.

We're excited to announce Blogging U.'s next offering, which begins next Monday, July 21st. Writing 201: Finding Your Story will invite participants to take their craft to the next level by focusing on more advanced storytelling and self-editing tools, from finding the right angle from which to narrate your story, to coming up with strong opening sentences.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

--- Roald Dahl

Writing 201 is a self-directed course on the art of revision: four weeks dedicated to self-editing and rewriting, looking at our work with a magnifying glass, and improving it. If you have existing posts that you'd like to work on, expand, or refocus, whether as a result of Writing 101 or not, this course will be ideal for you.

The nitty gritty

Over four weeks, we'll present four different workshops, each published on a Monday. You're free to read each workshop at your own pace — absorb it all in one day, or tackle parts of it throughout the week.

There is no assignment or posting requirement at the end of each workshop, but we'll offer a series of questions and discussions to reflect on every week. In your own time, you'll experiment with these techniques in the specific pieces you're working on. You'll decide how much time and effort you'd like to spend each day.

Just like in Writing 101, you'll be invited to join the Commons, a private forum for conversation, support, and feedback. Given the emphasis on editing, the Commons is a key component of this course: it will be the space to workshop your material. Workshopping is all about collaborative brainstorming: you'll offer specific, constructive feedback to others, and they'll do the same for you.

If you're a self-motivated blogger and think your writing can benefit from intensive feedback and greater focus, then Writing 201 might just be the perfect next step for your blog and for your craft. You'll find the signup form (and more details) here.