penny modra, meredith forrester and frunch nazzari – the good copy
Small Business
Melbourne, VIC
The Good Copy is a writing school, a publisher and a shop for word people. We run classes and workshops, curate an online bookshop, publish zines about writing and host Collingwood's longest-running crossword club.
Writing is central to so many people's jobs. Everyone stresses about it (probably because the nuts and bolts of English grammar haven’t been taught in Australian schools since 1972), but nobody talks about it.
When The Good Copy started out in 2013, our primary business was professional writing. Those of us who hadn't trained as editors felt hyper-aware of this knowledge gap. We founded the school as a place to explore grammar basics and writing tactics in a fun, practical, human way. And it took off!
Teaching is now The Good Copy's main focus. There are two nerds at the helm: Penny Modra, copywriter and ABC Radio Melbourne 'grammar enthusiast', and Meredith Forrester, copy editor and author of Make Grammar Great Again (Thames & Hudson, 2017).
Our flagship courses are Stop. Grammar Time. and Write Right. We also deliver one-off workshops such as Greatest 'its (Melbourne Art Book Fair, 2016) and The Active Voice (NIDAnights, 2017). Our students are writers of all stripes; we once had an AFL footballer, a PhD student and a helicopter engineer in the same class.
We now hold regular classes in Sydney, thanks to a partnership with the Walkley Foundation. In 2016 we began offering in-house teaching and style guide development for businesses.
Challenges for 2018: publish the first in our 'What to Fix' zine series ('Commas: WTF'); build a digital style guide development tool; launch our new course, Bottom Dollar, for freelancers starting out; and work towards an online learning hub so we can reach word people everywhere.
