Week 5

For this post I'm going to skip recapping what happened this week.  What I really want to talk about is a certain critical response I received for the rough draft of my short story today.  While I'm not one to whine or pout when someone doesn't like something I have written, and I am very open to advice for my work, the person who wrote this response was down right rude.  And it was completely unnecessary.  I was talked down to, insulted, and treated like I was ignorant and did not know how to write.  I did not sign up for this class to be belittled.  Quite frankly, I have never been so insulted by someone's "response" to a piece of my work ever.  And I've dealt with tough critics and blatantly honest people going on four years.  I will be showing up sometime next week at my professor's office to discuss this further.  I understand that he want us to be honest when we are critiquing and workshopping and I am totally fine with that, I prefer honesty; but this was taken way too far.  I am extremely disappointed with this person.  I know that in the grand scheme that this is just one person out of twenty-some odd other classmates; but this needs to be brought to the professor's attention. I am not going to let this kind of "critiquing" continue; this is not the kind of "honesty" that the professor was talking about. This was just rude and mean. 

On a more positive note, I enjoyed the time I had for my workshopping.  The majority of classmates gave me some great ideas and good advice.  They brought up aspects that I would have never thought about because I only have an author's perspective and their reader perspective has really come in handy.

All for now,
Liz

Week 4

Well, this week we didn't have class on Tuesday.  On Thursday we workshopped Lily's poems.  I'm really having issues with printing off annotated poems and a two page critique.  I really can't afford to use all that paper.  I would really appreciate it if we could do either one or the other.  I have other classes that require me to print off a good deal of paper and I cannot afford it.  I think this needs to be discussed in class and soon.  If anything I do not see the issue with simply emailing our two page critique to the writers that week.  It makes more sense and saves paper and money. 

I've been working a bit on my project and I have to workshop it this Thursday.  It's going to be a very scattered draft but I'm hoping for some good critiques that'll help me pull it altogether.

All for now,
Liz 

Week 3

Well, this week was pretty short-lived.  We only had class on Thursday due to the snow.  The break was nice, of course. :)  Anyway, on Thursday, we work shopped Claire, Kyle, and Brad's poems.  When I was annotating and typing up my 2 pg. critical analysis or what have you, I found myself repeating almost everything I had written down on the copy of the poems.  So I am not sure how useful having both the annotations and the critical analysis will be for the poets.  I understand why our professor wants us to do both, but sometimes I feel like it might be a waste of time and especially paper.  Maybe it will get better as we work shop more people.  From my understand we do not have class on Tuesday (February 8th) so I guess we're just work shopping Lily's poems on Thursday?  The class will be work shopping MY first draft for my story on Feb. 17th.  I am kind of dreading it because I have not started it (I know I know, I'm being a slacker).  I have a bunch of scenes and dialogue in my head and now I just have to knuckle down and get to the actual process of putting it down on paper.  This scares me because I'm worried it won't be like what I have in my head.  And I'm ranting.  Whoops.  Well, that's all for now!

Liz