What Writing Workshop Advice Optimizes For

God, for months I’ve been trying to write a long, comprehensive post about everything that I resent or that annoys me about the whole writing workshop phenomenon, & I keep not finishing it, so I’m gonna try just posting through it piece by piece.

The structure of a semester of a writing workshop usually consists of a repeated loop for most of the semester followed by a wrapping-up process at the end of the semester. The loop goes basically like this:

1. Every weekish, every student turns in a draft of something that they’re working on.

2. Every weekish, every student receives a packet of drafts written by other students.

3. Over the course of the week, each student reads through the packet of drafts making comments in the margins. Usually one also writes a few paragraphs responding to each piece.

4. Everyone comes into class with their comments on the drafts, & discusses each workshop piece for a portion of the class, striving to divide the time evenly between the week’s works. The writer of each piece sits in silence as it’s discussed. Usually towards the end of the segment, the writer gets a chance to ask questions and make comments.

Then back to step one, until the semester starts to run out, at which point the class switches over to the wrapping-up process. Students stop generating new work & focus on using the feedback they’ve received to revise the drafts. Then the revisions are given to the professor. Semester over.

There are a few major problems with this structure, but the biggest one is this: there is no point in the process where students are required to read their classmates’ revised work. So they never find out, in a systematic way, what their workshopping actually does to a draft, whether their advice & feedback makes a piece of writing better or worse.

I was about to say that they get no feedback on their feedback, but it’s even worse than that. You do get feedback on your feedback—social feedback during the workshop discussion itself. You hear whether your classmates like what you’re saying, or dislike it in a way that gets you attention, or are just bored by it. And in the absence of other feedback, there is kind of no option but to optimize for this social feedback. But there is obviously no particular reason that the things that get you attention & approval in a workshop discussion, would particularly coincide with advice that helps someone revise their work.

So, yes. That’s another reason why institutional literature sucks lately (besides the reason I already told you): people are revising their work based on advice that unavoidably optimizes for competing in the workshop discussion itself, not on actually making drafts better.