[MUSIC] Welcome to week four, we're going to talk about peer review this week. And right now in this segment, we're going to talk a little bit about what it means to give a good critique of the work that you're going to have in front of you. This week you're going to have a lot to do, maybe more critique work than you've had in any of the other classes up to now. Your work this week is to read the pieces and write your responses in the form of a letter. The letter should be one to two pages long, summarizing your responses to the work at hand. I want to give you a little bit of guidance on the kind of critiques that can be useful and some that aren't so useful. First of all, bear in mind that these are drafts, not finished work. The writer will use these critiques to revise. So you might frame your critique as a comment on where the story's going, not as though it's already ended up there, necessarily. From these critiques the writer is going to benefit from the perspective of a diverse readership. The readers benefit from the chance to clarify their ideas about the piece under discussion, and by extension about their own work. This critique can be nerve-wracking for the writer to receive, and even to think about. Bear in mind that we're dealing with drafts, not finished work. And our foremost responsibility to the writer is to be useful. Praise and criticism in a generous spirit are equally welcome. However, what writers often can best use at this point, is our report, our reflection of what in their work is unique, funny, pleasing, frightening, or strange. Approach with caution, any prescriptive speculation about how you might go about the piece if you were the writer. The writer is less likely to be looking for guidance about what we think should happen next. Although that kind of speculation can be welcome in some circumstances. She's likely to be more interested in our observation of what is already on the page. When I do a workshop at Wesleyan, this is how we do it. First of all, the students receive the story a week ahead of time. They read the story at home. Ideally, they read it through a second time with a pencil. And they write on the manuscript, all kinds of comments, they write sometimes right on the words. They talk about the punctuation. They talk about the word choice. They talk about large things in the plot. They talk a lot about characterization. They talk about the dialogue. And they actually write those things in the margin. Obviously in the current format, you're not going to be able to write directly on the manuscripts, but we will have occasion later on in this course to talk about very fine grain things. The next thing that the students do is they write a letter to address directly to the reader, outlining their responses. And that's the kind of thing that I'm going to ask you to do for this class. In a physical workshop, which I'll give you an example of in a little bit, the writer starts out reading a page or so from the story out loud. After that, the writer stays completely quiet and the students give their critiques one by one, followed by a group discussion. In the next segment, I'll put a student's story up for you to read. Then we'll go into a real workshop to give you a sense of the kinds of things a writer might get in response to his or her work, from people, writers, who are practiced at doing this, and have done a pretty good job in the past at giving good critique. [MUSIC]
