This week, you will read Warren Bowe’s “Guns for Teachers” (p. 68). Your workshop reviews should focus on how Bowe creates this narrator’s voice. What can you say about this narrator? Do you know the gender? The age? What’s the narrator’s attitude toward the topic? Your goal is to zero in on what works for you in the piece of writing and what doesn’t work. As in last week’s workshop, it’s not enough to simply identify this; 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!
