Grade 11 · printable course

Craft and Revision: A Creative Writing Workshop

Grade 11 · 315 pages · 35 lessons · PDF, print at home

A semester course in which students write, critique, and revise original fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction using explicit craft criteria rather than intuition alone. Because the course runs without a peer workshop, students learn a repeatable self-critique protocol and a set of specific questions to pose to a parent acting as first reader. Each unit pairs close study of short mentor texts with a full-process piece: draft, diagnose against criteria, revise, and reflect. By the end, students hold a portable toolkit for evaluating and improving their own writing in any genre.

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What is inside

Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

Craft and Revision: A Creative Writing Workshop

35 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: The Image Made of Words: Poetry and the Line8 lessons
  1. 1.The distinction between an abstract statement of feeling and a concrete image that implies feeling
  2. 2.Line break as a meaning-making unit, specifically enjambment creating momentary double meaning
  3. 3.The self-critique protocol applied to image specificity
  4. 4.The effect of line-break placement on emphasis and pacing independent of word choice
  5. 5.Reader feedback as a basis for targeted (not global) revision
  6. 6.The gap between a poem's literal paraphrase and its interpreted meaning
  7. 7.Formal risk-taking justified by its effect on meaning, not by novelty alone
  8. 8.The three-way distinction between abstract statement, concrete image, and image-as-implicit-statement
Unit 2: Scene, Summary, and the Shape of a Story8 lessons
  1. 9.The distinction between scene and summary in short fiction
  2. 10.Show-vs-tell revision of an emotion-naming sentence into concrete sensory detail
  3. 11.The effect of narrative reveal order on reader inference
  4. 12.Application of the self-critique protocol to structural criteria (scene/summary, show/tell) on one's own draft
  5. 13.The diagram of reveal order versus chronological event order in a student's own story
  6. 14.Authorial withholding of information as a structural choice in an unfamiliar text
  7. 15.Generation of a structurally alternative version of one's own story and articulation of the resulting change in meaning
  8. 16.Definitions of scene, summary, and the three-step self-critique protocol
Unit 3: Writing What Actually Happened11 lessons
  1. 17.Scene vs. summary in a true-event narrative
  2. 18.The definition of concrete detail
  3. 19.The taught R/J test applied to the exact sentence pairs used in direct instruction
  4. 20.The mechanism by which scene vs. summary changes reader experience of true material
  5. 21.Self-reflection vs. self-justification in first-person narrative writing
  6. 22.Divergence between personal memory and a neutral factual record
  7. 23.The self-critique protocol applied to a personal-essay draft
  8. 24.Ethical defensibility of a passage about a real person in the student's own true-event draft
  9. 25.Structural ordering choices for a novel true-event narrative and their interpretive effects
  10. 26.A complete revision cycle on a personal essay draft
  11. 27.Reflection vs. justification in an unfamiliar published text
Unit 4: The Portfolio: Revision as Argument8 lessons
  1. 28.The genre-specific criteria sets from Units 1-3 applied diagnostically to one's own prior drafts
  2. 29.The self-critique protocol and its genre-conditional application
  3. 30.Revision priority-setting under a scarcity constraint
  4. 31.Criteria-based defense versus preference-based justification
  5. 32.A reflective essay defending named revision choices with criterion and evidence
  6. 33.The parent-reader question sets, generalized to an untaught genre
  7. 34.Transfer of the self-critique protocol to an unfamiliar piece and unstated criteria
  8. 35.Portfolio assembly format and completeness requirements