Workshops

I think workshops can work if done a certain way. Of course there are always people who won’t take it too seriously or who aren’t as good at giving feedback, but there are also people that are really good at it. In my past classes I had always work shopped with the entire class, so even if there were a handful of people with unhelpful feedback, there were also those that were helpful. With a larger amount of feedback, you can compare how different people react to different parts of your work, which allows you to eliminate and expand on your work where necessary.

In our current class, the very small groups are ineffective. Only having two or three opinions on a work, which might not even be complete, is pretty pointless unless you’re lucky enough to be working with someone who’s taking it 100% seriously and is really good at editing. Another thing that makes work shopping in our class hard is that the prompts are so vague. Everyone in your group most likely approached it completely differently, and if you’re not sure what they’re going for it’s hard to help them reach their goal or steer them in the right direction. I feel the workshops in our class only help with minor editing changes and confusing sentence structures, but since they are all first drafts chances are those things would have been changed once you went to revise it yourself anyway.

Workshops are definitely necessary but if they’re went about the wrong way they can be a huge waste of time.