Response to Writing Workshop

When I was first introduced to the Writing Workshop concept in the seventh grade, I was thrilled. As an avid writer I enjoyed the prospect of sharing my work with others, and those surrounding me were not up to my writing capability and thus could not effectively critique my writing. As I entered high school and Honors and AP courses, the lesser writers were weeded out, and I found myself in familiar company. Although this marked the slackening of the workshop’s "fun," it also marked a dramatic increase in the program’s effectiveness.

Last week’s workshop was my first in college, and I found that despite the school’s reputation as an engineering school, the quality of writing was far from missing. I’d never written anything unoriginal before last week, and I believe that this trend is responsible for the caliber of my abstract. The concept of an abstract was not new to me, however, but when I wrote my first one in eleventh grade, it was a summation of my own writing rather than of someone else’s.

Essentially, perhaps attributable to my lack of experience or late-hour of my abstract’s creation, my first abstract was not up to par in my opinion. After reading some examples of poor, average, and excellent abstracts, I was privileged to read abstracts written by fellow classmates. After formulating my own ideas about where I strayed, I was handed critiques of my writing from others in order to add to and narrow down these ideas.

My overall reaction to the workshop is positive. Perhaps it can be attributed to the fact that my writing was not up to my usual standards or that other writers around me were simply above my original standards. Basically I feel that I learned a great deal about abstracts, and how to write this personally foreign type of paper.