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Guidelines for Writer's Workshop

writing, computer, writer's workshop
A student works on a draft of her essay during writer's workshop

Guidelines for Writer's Workshop

Expectations for Writer's Workshop

  1. Find topics and purposes for your writing that matter to you, your life, who you are, and who you might become.
  2. Create and maintain plans of your territories as a writer: the ideas, topics, purposes, genres, forms, and techniques that you’d like to experience and explore.
  3. Make your own decisions about what’s working and what needs more work in pieces of your writing.
    • Be your own first responder.
    • Ready yourself with a critical, literary eye and ear

4.  Listen to, ask questions about, and comment on others’ writing in ways that help them move their writing forward, toward literature.
5.  Maintain a record of the pieces of writing you finish. File finished writing in your writing portfolio.
6.  Attempt professional publication.
7.  Recognize that readers’ eyes and minds need your writing to be conventional in format, spelling, punctuation, and usage.
    • Work toward conventionality and legibility.
    • Use everything you know about format, spelling, punctuation, and usage as you compose.
    • Keep an individualized proofreading list that you check your writing against when you edit.
8.  Take care of the materials I’ve provided for you.
9.  Each nine weeks, establish and work toward significant, relevant goals for yourself as a writer.
10.  In every writing workshop, take a deliberate stance toward writing well; try to make your writing literature.
11.  Work hard in writing workshop. Recreate happy times from your life, work through sad times, discover what you know about a subject and learn more, convey information and request it, parody, play, explore, argue, apologize, advise, sympathize, imagine, look and look again, express love, show gratitude, and make money.

Rules for Writer's Workshop

1.  Save everything! It’s all part of the history of the piece of writing, plus you never know what you might want to come back to later and use for this essay or for another piece.
2.  Date and label everything you write to help you keep track of what you’ve done (e.g., plans, draft #1, brainstorming).
    • On the computer, label multiple versions D1, D2, etc.
3.  Write on one side of the paper only. Always skip lines. Always print double-spaced.  On the computer, use Times New Roman, 12 point font, double-spaced.
    • These conventions will make revision, polishing, and editing easier and more productive.
4.  Draft your prose writing in sentences and paragraphs. Draft your poems in lines and stanzas.  Don’t go back into a mess of text and try to create order. Format as you go: real writers do this, too.
5.  Get into the habit of punctuating and spelling as conventionally as you can while you’re composing: this is something else real writers do.
6.  Understand that writing is thinking. Do nothing to distract the other writers. Don’t put your words into our brains as we’re struggling to find our own. Instead, find your private, internal,writing place, lock the door, and listen to your voice.
    • NO TALKING during Writer's Workshop unless you are peer conferencing in the lounge or conferring with me.
    • You may listen to music AS LONG AS no one else can hear it.
    • YOU MUST BE working on your writing for AP English.
    • YOU MAY SIT wherever you would like (aside from the lounge) as long as you are writing.  You can bring and leave camp chairs (especially if you want to donate it to the class for use in other periods).
    7.  When you confer with me, use as soft a voice as I use when I talk to you: whisper.
    8.  Confer with a peer when you have a reason to do so
    • Use a conference area (the peer conferencing lounge) and record responses on peer conferencing forms (that will be turned in with the drafts), so the writer leaves the conference with a plan.
    • Limit peer conferences to occasions when you have a specific problem that could benefit from a specific friend’s response.
    9.  Self-edit as completely as you can in a color different from the print of your text.
    • Complete an editing checklist to show what you know about conventions of writing.
    10.  Write as well and as much as you can: work hard and make literature.
    ƒ
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