Advanced Writing Workshop Portfolio

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are you writing about?

• Why are you writing about this topic?

• What do you want to accomplish by writing about this topic?

Have a purpose for your writing.

• All authors have a purpose for their writing. Whether your purpose is simply to write for pleasure or to be published in a peer reviewed journal, identifying a purpose can help you meet the expectations of your audience.

Know your audience.

• All authors have an audience. By knowing your audience, you may be better able to meet their expectations in your writing.

Know your genre.

• All writing fits into a genre. By knowing the conventions of your genre, you may also be better able to meet the expectations of your audience in your writing.

Read a lot of other works in that genre

• Reading other works in a specific genre will help you learn the conventions of that genre. You may then use those works as mentor texts for your own writing.

Choose a mentor text – or three!

• After reading other works in the genre, you may choose a few to use as mentor texts in order to enhance your own writing. By choosing more than one mentor text, you may prevent your writing from resembling another author’s work too closely.

Use detail – be specific!

• Referring back to the topic using words like ‘he, she, it, or they’ can be confusing to the reader. Instead, restate the name of a person, place, or thing, when you refer back to it, and only try to use pronouns in every other sentence. This is because your writing should be specific without sounding redundant.

Be authentic.

• Don’t write about something that you are not invested in. The best writing comes when you write about something that affects you on a personal level.

Embrace shitty first drafts.

• Acknowledge that most writing isn’t very good the first time around. By embracing the shitty first draft, you allow room for revisions.

Revise when you can.

• Revisions are encouraged and may occur whenever the urge hits. This will help you improve your writing.

Read your work out loud.

• Nothing helps with writing more than reading your own work out loud. This will help you identify words and phrases that you would like to revise.

Listen to other people read your work out loud.

• I was just kidding before; if anything helps you with writing more than reading your own work out loud, it is listening to other people read your work out loud. This will prove an even more effective way to view your writing from a new perspective.

Share your work.

• By sharing your work with other people, you may be inspired to make revisions at a later time.