Less is Less: Assessors' Comments on  Student Portfolios for LTWR 325

LTWR 325: Creative Writing Workshop

Text 1: Revision is hard to track—needed clearer marking of drafts. The writing is at times very good in the development of imagery. The plots in the stories suffer from predictable—trick endings.

Text 2: Demonstrates significant/thoughtful revision. Poetry and stories are visual, making that difficult movement into symbolic language that is not heavy handed. This portfolio did not include a reflective essay.

Text 3: The poetry is better than the stories. The writing lacks concrete connections; the characterizations are weak and underdeveloped; the plots are so predictable as to be unlikely. The writing tries to tell the moral/message instead of showing. Reflective essay reveals that student sees gulf between academic and creative writing.

Text 4: This writing demonstrates some basic writing problems: typos, awkward sentences, lack of revision. Needs more sentence variety and concrete details.

Text 5: Good drafts that while sometimes quite vivid, need revision. Pretty good dialogue. Sentence level errors: punctuation and grammar. No revisions of stories included.

Text 6: The stories lack a central focus—why should I care about these characters and what they do? Stories are weak; sentence level problems: word choice, etc.

Text 7: Excellent character development, description…This writing has clear focus and clearly makes the "human connection" through astute language use.

Text 8: Writing is often excellent with occasional areas that need development.

Text 9: Writing is good and does reflect some thoughtful revision. The last story does suffer from some typos and problematic sentences that hurt the quality.

Text 10: No early drafts included, so it is difficult to measure the degree of revision. Stories: lots of missing punctuation, some awkward sentences.

Text 11: No early draft(s) included—no evidence of revision, typos, missing words, dangling modifiers. This writer is telling instead of showing. The poems and the stories seem cliché. This writer shows basic writing problems.

Text 12: No early draft included. Writing lacks focus. Stories rely on cliché plots. A couple of the poems are quite visual/interesting, but the stories have no clear point.

Text 13: Writing suffers from problems at basic language use/lack of editing. Writing tells, doesn’t show through the characters’ actions.

Text 14: Writing is often excellent but needs editing.

Text 15: The writing is sometimes excellent, but there are sentence level problems. The poetry is stronger than the stories. Reflections on process insightful.

Text 16: No early drafts included, but what there is reflects a lack of attention to revision. Writing is often burdened by clichés. The name of a character changes.

Text 17: The writing reflects deep revision, but the stories do not rise to excellence.

Text 18: While revision is evident, this writer needs to spend more time on editing. Dialogue sometimes awkward; lots of punctuation errors.

Text 19: Writing has been revised but needs more revision. There are however some moments marked by great images.

Text 20: The poetry is often very good and revised. One short story is missing and the one present needs deep revision. Poetry is C level or above. Short story—not passing.

Text 21: The poetry is often good, but the stories suffer from a lack of revision and expansion. Many editing problems as well. I also have trouble caring what these characters do!