What and How We Evaluate: Teaching Revision Part 10

This is a continuation of my posts on teaching revision, most recently this one. If you’d like to contribute a guest post or response, please contact me at m [dot] salesses [at gmail etc.].

ONE OF THE THINGS I’ve been thinking about is how grading can improve the workshop. No one seems to like grading students’ creative writing itself, which I understand. But I’ve never found grading papers to improve papers, either. Grading various steps in the process can improve paper-writing. Grading is best when it improves the course dynamics during the course, which is why grading process can work.

I’ve seen various ways of grading creative writing courses, and often a lot of the grade seems to come down to attendance and participation. The critique letters are sometimes graded or contribute to the participation grade.

I like big participation grades, but here are a few other ways I think grading can be used to improve a workshop.

1. Grading critique letters as a form. 

This summer, as I asked students to ask more questions in their critique letters–questions, as I’ve detailed elsewhere in this series, help to center the writer instead of the workshopper as they ask the writer to center her own intentions and to think past the workshop to when she will continue revising on her own–I also graded their letters more heavily. I told them that a letter that didn’t meet the minimum requirements (that had no questions and was not at least a page long) would automatically fail. I also gave extensive guidelines for how to write their letters and I made a lot of comments early on in the schedule and got the letters back to them the next class, so that they could learn from the comments as they wrote their next letters. I put a grade on their letters, large and specific. And, of course, the letters improved immensely and became much more helpful as the course went on.

Critique letters are a genre, and I’m not sure we spend enough time teaching students how to write them. This can then translate into workshops where students are unprepared to question audience or center the author or have an actual conversation. Letters can often be overly prescriptive, mean in a way that shuts down revision, or too nice in a way that carries no substance. And letters can be very convincing or not at all convincing, either of which can be a problem when students focus on suggestions instead of questions. The art of persuasion is liable to take over in lieu of the content. We don’t talk enough about style in critique letters, even as we talk about it in terms of the workshop manuscripts and outside readings.

Making the critique letters a high grading priority can help make the workshop better and more prepared, and it’s an easier way, perhaps, for students to digest and practice the kind of feedback that the instructor will also ask the class to do as they discuss the workshop piece. It’s also an arguably more objective grade to assess.

2. Workshop self-evaluations

I also asked students to write evaluations of their workshops in the week after they got workshopped. This was another part of their grade. Here’s what I asked them to cover:

• What new things you learned about your story.
• What new things you learned about your writing style.
• How your classmates interpreted your story and its audience and how similar or different their interpretations were from your own. And what that tells you.
• What questions you still have.
• What the most helpful part of workshop was.
• What the least helpful part of workshop was.
• What you are thinking about now that you weren’t thinking about before.
• What you learned from people’s letters to you.
• What you might write if you were to write a letter to yourself (if you were the reader of your story and not the author).

I would have also had them write about what they planned to do in revision, but I made that a separate assignment. I’m sure this list isn’t perfect, but it gave them a list to follow, which also made grading easier for me.

I wanted them to think about their particular workshop piece, of course, but also about their writing in general, and about the workshop itself. By reflecting on the workshop, they were able to see how they could be better worshippers to other students. This also helped them to adjust to a style of workshopping that was less familiar to them, and to see that questions really were helpful to the author–something that didn’t seem intuitive to them. All of this improved the workshop experience as the course went on.

3. Self-Analysis of Elements of Fiction

“Self-Analysis of Elements of Fiction” was what I call my students’ chance to detail their conceptualizations of plot, arc, stakes, characterization, etc. in their stories–and the changes to those concepts that occur as they go through a 15-week course and as they revise. We covered specific “elements” week by week, but I made sure to talk about craft as cultural and to emphasize that there are multiple understandings of what makes a good plot, for example. In their Self-Analysis, I asked them to write about how they were using plot, to keep using that as an example, in their own work, and how their use of plot may have changed or not because of our class, their workshop, their revision, what they read, etc.

This assignment was about grading their critical thinking of their own work. Again, this made it easier to grade what went into their creative work and into our class and class participation more objectively. Here they could show that they had learned the ways we had talked about certain craft elements in class; and they could show their engagement, resistance, and use of these elements on an individual level; all of which should hopefully make them more aware of how cultural and even person our understanding is of these things we call craft. For example, they might say, “I liked E.M. Forster’s definition of plot as causation, and it helped me increase the causation in my story, which also meant giving my character more agency, when she decided to do xyz, etc.” Or they might say, “I wanted to resist Forster’s definition of plot and work more in the vein of Greek plots that deal with coincidence, because coincidence seems a powerful force in my own life, and by making this more intentional, I realized that fate or destiny was more of a theme in my story than I had thought, etc.” Or they might say, “My understanding of plot built on causation and coincidence, as I tried to show how coincidence is interpreted as a string of causation by my character, who doesn’t want to give up control of his life, but learns in his character arc to etc.” Or so forth.

Again, more conscious thought on all of this–all of this stuff that we were going over and talking about in class–helped improve the workshop experience. Grading these other things made sense to students, because of the relative objectivity and the acceptance of guidelines for these assignments versus guidelines for what makes an A story, and so they worked hard on these assignments, which of course improved their writing and critiquing. I would also say that it helped them to think more consciously and consistently about their pieces and what and how and why to revise them.