Dr. Sean Meehan

Morningside College

Workshop Expectations.

Since this is a course that focuses on the craft and art of writing, the underlying mission of this course, informing how I will teach  and how we will approach the various objectives listed on the syllabus, can be summed up in the following words: to guide my students in learning to become more effective, powerful and confident writers, in their studies at Morningside and in their lives beyond. This mission is based upon several, related assumptions that I have formed in my experience as a writer and a teacher of writing and language: that language is a creative (and fluid) medium for expression and learning; that the power of language and writing is discovered by the learner, not memorized; that the discovery process implies the need for both guidance and experimentation, the taking of educated risks. This is what we will do in the workshop environment of this course. A writer is someone who writes.

Think of Frederick Douglass; he learns and enacts the power of writing  and literacy by risking his very life. For me, the Jacob Lawrence painting (reprinted on the Writing web page) captures in its feeling of urgency this combination of creativity and risk.

With these thoughts in mind, you can expect the work in the course, and during each class, to follow these guidelines:

►A workshop environment. This will likely be a new educational experience to most of you. A workshop means that the class will largely be student-centered; the focus of our discussions and work in class will be determined by the research, reading, and writing that each of you is engaged in at that moment. My role, as a more experienced writer and one who understands best practice for learning language use, is to provide guidance.

Be prepared to present to the class your work in progress: this means at different times of a writing workshop or discussion of reading, you will be expected to articulate where you are in the process, what problems and surprises you are encountering in your writing, what kind of feedback you need from the rest of us.

During workshops, you will be working with peers in giving their work the kind of peer response and feedback that we need as writers.

These features of the workshop will all count toward your overall evaluation in the course: specifically, they will figure in to your participation and informal speech grades.

►Writing will be developmental—as it always is.

We will move from journal response (highly informal) to experiment (informal, but public) to essay (which reiterates the process from idea to draft to published version) to final portfolio (in which you reflect on your overall progress and select your best work of the term to develop further).

The workshop environment of the class supports this development. The given is that all of our writing is in process and that each of us wants to develop further and more persuasively the ideas we are working on in our writing. Your active participation in the workshop—as both writer and reader—will be assessed and become part of your overall grade. Don’t come to workshop (which in this case means most of our classes) empty-handed, without something to present or workshop. You will be bored sitting by yourself and lose credit for that class. The final portfolio you will turn in at the end of the class reflects this developmental focus: you will go back to one of the four shorter essays you writer and revise and expand it. For a description of how these four types of writing assignments you will encounter will be assessed, see Assessment.

►Applied readings. Anytime that reading is due for a class you should be prepared to have a quiz on that reading assignment. These quizzes will emphasize two things: your ability to demonstrate that you have done the reading as expected; your ability to demonstrate that you can apply ideas from the reading to your own writing and research. This means that I don’t expect or want you to have memorized the reading assignment (will not be asking you to recite it back to me); rather, this means that I expect you to have read the texts and begun to think about ways you can apply its ideas and lessons to your ongoing work. The reading is designed to inform our understanding of writing. Our primary focus is on the writing—not literary criticism. We will be reading as writers, giving attention to how the essays work and what we might learn from the writers about writing that kind of essay or in that style. In effect, we will workshop the essays: what we find effective and ineffective, what we might like to experiment with on our own. In each of the 4 sections, I will assign some of the reading and you will be expected to select some of the essays on your own and to prepare to discuss your reading in class.

►Self-Reflection. A key to developing your power as a writer will be to develop your own understanding of your writing—what its strengths and weaknesses are, where you want to go as a writer and how you can get there. Whenever you publish an essay you will write a brief self-reflection on the process of that essay and the progress you feel you are making as a writer. I will also expect you to keep track of your progress as an editor of your own work—including language and grammar problems you are interested in improving. I will expect each of you to make use of the Guide to Grammar and Writing site I have posted (one of the best I have seen) and to keep track in your journal of the issues you encounter with the writing process and with editing mechanics such as citation format, punctuation and usage.