Some Syndicate Guidelines (A Proposal):
1. Any person may write as much as they want for any given week; however, he or she may only share the target number of pages for a given week (2-3, 5, etc.).
A. These pages could be shared in advance depending on the level of response that the author wants (assuming that more time with the text will lead readers to more insights into the writing)
B. If the writing sample is part of a longer work that we have not read, a short summary of what is going on might be helpful to get an idea of the context of what you're writing.
2. If we only have an hour or so, we should devote at most 20 minutes to a person (assuming we stay at three members).
A. We don't have to go a full 20 minutes with each person—provided the author gets the feedback he or she wants.
B. If the author doesn’t have the feedback that he or she wants after 20 minutes, I would advise moving on. This will probably avoid causing frustration to one or more people. Hopefully it won’t come to that, though.
3. The general structure of the twenty minutes should be as follows:
A. Background of what we are going to read (as the author deems necessary).
B. Discussing the piece of writing.
i. It would be helpful if the author provided us with some guideline as to what he or she expects to hear from us.
ii. If they want criticism, what sort of criticism?
a. Wanting a general impression: is my work interesting, does it flow well, etc.
b. Wanting to address a specific issue: dialogue, punctuation, characterization, or some other mechanic of writing.
c. Some other criticism requested by the author.
4. Last but not Least: the goal of the group is to help people become better writers and to have fun writing.
A. This will not happen by attacking someone’s writing.
i. Attacking someone’s writing is criticizing it without making a suggestion for improvement.
ii. Attacking someone’s writing is criticizing an area unrelated to what the author asked for criticism about (i.e. the name of my character has nothing to do with dialogue).
B. Becoming better writers will not happen without eventually critiquing what we write.
By the way, the original document did actually have correct formatting, as did this before I posted it. The blog seems rather insistent that point ii. under letter B. not be indented properly. Sigh.
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