A writing workshop is described on pages 12 and 13 in your book. Review those pages again, paying special attention to the bullet list on page 13. These five bullets are the foundation and guiding principles of the writing workshops we will conduct in this class.
Everyone is expected to participate in the writing workshop, both as an author submitting work and as a reviewer exploring the submitted work. For the first three weeks, you will practice being reviewers, using pieces of writing by professional authors.
This week, you will read Annie Dillard’s “from Heaven and Earth in Jest” (pp. 28-29). Your workshop reviews should focus on how Dillard both shows and tells in this excerpt and why. Both showing and telling are necessary; the writer must decide when to use which strategy. Do you think Dillard uses either strategy too much?
Your purpose is to discuss what works for you in the piece of writing and what doesn’t work. It’s not enough to simply identify this, though; you must be able to explain your responses. This is a bit tricky. Because good writing is an art as well as a craft, the whole will always be more than the sum of its partswhich is to say that a piece of writing will almost never be fully unraveled and dissected to reveal all its secrets. However, writers are always interested in learning what they can!
