Writer’s Workshop 1.1 Introduction

Writer’s Workshop 1.1: Introduction

Throughout the course of your secondary education and any education you receive beyond, you will be responsible for various kinds of written response from short essays to long research documents, poems to short stories, and lab reports to daily journals. Not all writing should be approached in the same way and there are very many things to consider when writing.

Thus, as part of your Humanities course work, you will begin your journey to competent (and perhaps even professional) writing by engaging with many styles of writing and many styles of reading as part of this ongoing Writer’s Workshop. By the end of your first year of Humanities, you will be well on your way to written fluency and excellence.

The Writer’s Workshop consists of six components within a three-step process:

Workshop 3-Step Process:

1. Learning and Building

• Regular Lessons and Textbook Readings
• Vocabulary Building Exercises

2. Thinking and Creation

• Reading and Rhetoric Discussions and Exercises
• Written Responses (essays, poems, short stories, speeches, research papers, etc.)

3. Editing and Presentation

• Peer-review and editing workshops
• Teacher-Student Review Meetings

Within each Writer’s Workshop Project we will engage with this process. For each major book we read in the Humanities 101-103 course you will complete one project (three trimesters, each with three books and corresponding projects).

Writer’s Workshop Projects:

First Trimester: Big History, Mythology, Humanities

• Mode 1 (Narrative)
• Research 1 (Bibliography & Summary)
• Creative 1 (short form)

Second Trimester: Ancient History, Religion, Philosophy

• Mode 2 (Persuasive/Argumentative)
• Research 2 (Analytical)
• Creative 2 (medium form)

Third Trimester: Modern History, Science, Literature

• Mode 3 (Oration)
• Research 3a or Creative 3a (long form)
• Research 3b or Creative 4b (long form)

Additionally, as part of your science classes at Aegis Institute, you will be writing lab reports. A parallel Science-Writer’s Workshop will be presented during your three first-year science courses.

We are modeling the Humanities Writer’s Workshop program to be rigorous but accomplishable, commensurate with a writing intensive college class. Thus, we are following the Gordon Rule standard, which expects that you will write 6,000 words within a single class at a minimum. This will seem difficult at the outset, but as you get used to writing and writing frequently, writing so much will not be as difficult. To help ease you into this process, we are setting the easiest genres of writing in the first trimester and building into the more difficult types in later trimesters once you have more experience.

Thus, plan for a minimum of 6,000 words per trimester spread across your various assignments and projects; this approximately breaks down to slightly less than 2 double-spaces typed pages of work a week (calculated for a 13-week trimester and assuming about 250 words per page). This is honestly not much; up to this point, the number of words you have read on this page is about as much as one might need to write in a week.

The Writer’s Workshop concludes with a capstone project broken into two parts. This capstone project can either be academically or creatively rigorous depending on the student’s inclinations. Either the student will produce a substantial research document or a lengthy creative work; either option will present its own challenges and rigors, so do not assume one to be intrinsically easier.