“It’s a special kind of person who attends this class on a weekend,” says our grammar guru Penny Modra.

It’s 9am on one of the hottest spring days of the season, and there are about 20 of us in a small office-cum-classroom in Redfern, Sydney. Hosted by Melbourne publisher and writing school The Good Copy, we’re about to spend an entire day learning about dangling modifiers, modal verbs and subordinate clauses. On a Saturday. By choice.

Stop. Grammar Time is a punnily titled short course for word nerds and the semantically curious. I’m a little of column A and a little of column B, but mostly I’m just anxious that I’ll use the word “whom” incorrectly in public. My girlfriend already doesn’t allow me to fill in the crossword puzzles we do together – what’s next, public shaming?

Like most of my generation, I never learned (or “learnt” if you want to get all British about it) anything beyond basic sentence structure in school. Not because I was glued to MTV, but because formal grammar was taken out of the Australian curriculum in the mid-1970s. It wasn’t until I started attempting to learn other languages in my teens that I realised something was missing. I didn’t do anything about it, mind you. I pressed on, graduated from university and at some point started putting “writer” down as my main occupation. Still, ask me whether an object is laying flat or lying flat and my brain takes a quick nap.

Imposter syndrome is one of the most common reasons people cite for attending these workshops; mostly aged from mid-20s to mid-40s, these are my people. On the day I’m here, the group comprises editors, administrators, a medical doctor, a smattering of news cadets and a couple of keen beans who just wanted a brush up. We take our seats and are unanimously startled when one of the first things on the agenda is to take a brief test.

Over the course of the day, Modra – our own helpful, hipper reincarnated Clippy – leads us through three distinct units, each one interspersed with wordy comedy clips from Key and Peele, David Mitchell’s Soapbox and 30 Rock. “Mind blown” is a hellishly overused phrase, but I feel like mine is being put to use in a way not even my PhD candidature could prompt.

Some time around lunch break, I am surprised to learn I’d been burying important information with parenthetical commas around names and titles, just because I thought they made the sentence “look” correct. In other words, I wasn’t looking out for the reader. This realisation induced one of the main messages of the day: getting a handle on the structural knowledge of grammar makes for cleaner writing, but it’s not an excuse to be a pain-in-the-butt pedant. The course’s openness to change and the acceptance that language is in a constant state of flux is also refreshing.

“It’s hard not to be irritated by language change,” says Modra. “Humans are hardwired to hate change. I think that’s why people cringe when they hear neologisms like ‘Brexit’ and ‘Brangelina’. But I try to bend like the willow on that stuff. There are many Englishes – mine isn’t ‘correct’.”

At 5.30pm we’re given a short, persnickety graduation exam to take at home, as well as a sew-on patch should we choose to proudly show off our geekery in public. The trepidation of the morning has segued into enthusiasm; a few of us head up the road to the pub.

As one of Modra’s favourite quotes from Stephen King goes: “Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it’s the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.”

• The Good Copy is holding a two-day intensive grammar courses in Melbourne on 20 & 21 October, and a one-day class in Sydney on 25 November.