Week 5 Crit: Prose
A line-edit exchange, and the week the method has to hold onto the work while the room gets personal about sentences.
22 March 2027
Bring#
A page of your own prose — an essay draft, a story, an email you’re not sure about — printed or on a shared doc the room can mark up directly.
The crit#
Line edits, in pairs: mark the page sentence by sentence, then talk through only the marks, not the page as a whole. This is the week this week’s lecture is really for — prose is where “the work, not the person” gets hardest to keep straight, because a sentence sounds like a person talking. The rule holds anyway: a mark on a sentence, defensible on that sentence alone.
Leaves with#
A marked-up page with at least three edits you could each defend to the person who wrote them, out loud, without it turning into a comment about the person.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- your edit marks a specific sentence or clause, not "the tone"
- you can separate, out loud, a comment about the sentence from a comment about the writer
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor
- Idris Fenn — tutor