Expectations for Writing Workshop
ü Find topics and purposes for your writing that matters to you, your life, who you are and to whom you want to become.
ü Keep a list of you territories as a writer: the topics, purposes, audiences, genres, forms and techniques that are your specialties or that you’d like to experience and explore.
ü Try new topics, purposes, audiences, genres, forms and techniques.
ü Make your own decisions about what’s working and what needs more work in pieces of your writing. Be your own first responder. Read yourself with a critical, literary eye and ear.
ü Listen to, ask questions about, and comment on others’ writing in ways that help them move their writing forward, toward literature.
ü Take notes and create a binder of information from the writing workshop.
ü Recognize that good writers build quality upon a foundation of quantity.
ü Work on your writing at home
ü Maintain a record of the pieces of writing you finish, and file finished writing (including all drafts, notes, etc.) chronologically in your binder.
ü Sometime during the year, but only when you’ve been taught about the particular genre, produce a finished piece of writing in each of the following genres: a memoir, three to five poems or songs, a short story, a book review, an essay, a profile.
ü Attempted professional publication.
ü Recognize that readers’ eye and minds need your writing to be conventional in format, spelling, punctuation, and usage. Work toward conventionality and legibility, and use everything you know about format, spelling, punctuation, and usage as you compose.
ü Keep an individualized proofreading list that you check your writing against when you edit and proofread.
ü Take care of the writing materials, resources, and equipment in the classroom.
ü In every writing workshop try to make your writing the best you can make it by using what you’ve been shown in conferences and mini-lessons.
ü Re-create happy times in your life, work through sad times, discover what you know about a subject and learn more, convey information and request it, parody, petition, play, explore, argue, apologize, advise, sympathize, empathize, imagine, look and look again, express love, show gratitude.
Expectations from Nancie Atwell- Lessons That Change Writers.