Welcome!

This course is designed for young writers and those who support young writers. Subjects covered include what critiques are (and are not!), how critiques can help young authors become better writers, and how even people with no critiquing experience can provide constructive, meaningful feedback to their young writer. The goal of this course is to develop confident writers and confident critiquers.

Action Items:

• Do you and your young writer understand what a critique is?

• And what a critique is not?

The first step to a successful critique is having a conversation with your young writer to clarify what they hope to glean from the critique. The type of critique a writer is seeking may change depending on factors ranging from their energy level to the type of day they’ve had to their plans for the piece being critiqued.

Action Items:

• Download the Critiquing Continuum handout.

• Review the array of critiquing options with your young writer.

• Discuss what your young writer hopes to gain from this particular critique. (Note: Your young writer may want a different type of critique on different days so make sure you’re both clear on what they want with each critiquing session.)

Once your young writer has selected a goal for the critique, it’s time to set your own goal! Do you want to deepen your connection with your child? Help them grow as a writer? Have an opportunity to praise their skills? Whatever it is (and it can be multiple goals!), having a clear goal for yourself will help strengthen the critiquing process.

Action Items:

• Think through possible personal goals for the upcoming critique.

• Follow your young writer’s lead and set your own goal or goals for this critique session.

The focus of a writing critique is on the art of the story or poem, rather than the mechanics of the writing. The key structural issues, such as character growth and pacing, are discussed in this lesson. It is still important to address misspellings and grammatical errors, but save that work for a line edit rather than mentioning it in an initial critique. This distinction will help your young writer stay in the creative zone longer.

Action Items:

• If you haven’t already done so, download the Critiquing Continuum handout. Review the array of critiquing options with your young writer and then discuss what your young writer hopes to gain from this particular critique. (Note: Your young writer may want a different type of critique on different days so make sure you’re both clear on what they want with each critiquing session.)

• Read your young writer’s piece all the way through to gain a full sense of it.

• Next, re-read the piece with a focus on the issues your young writer selected as goals for the critique.

• Lastly, give the piece a read with an eye towards pointing out everything your young writer is doing well. Mention those out with specific words of praise. Underlining great words or sections, adding smiles or stickers, and utilizing exclamation points to emphasize your delight can help your young writer take in those often-hard-to-hear compliments.

Sometimes even the most thrilling writing hits a stopping point that can be hard to overcome. One of the handiest things a critiquer can suggest and a young writer can learn are ways to troubleshoot their writing issues!

Action Items:

• Discuss which of the techniques in the video sound helpful to your young writer. Have they tried any of these in the past? How did that turn out?

• Brainstorm troubleshooting solutions of your own! For your young writer, what’s the hardest part of building a story? What do they think they could do to challenge or overcome that difficulty? Give each idea a try and then evaluate the results.

Compliment sandwiches are a foolproof method for constructive critiquing, and in this lesson we’ll be teaching you what they are, what they can do, and how to construct a compliment sandwich of your own!

Action Items:

• Give a compliment sandwich to your young writer and have them give one to you - about anything, from chores to interactions with teachers to meal preparations!

• Check out the Compliment Sandwich handout for extra support and a helpful visual reminder of this critiquing structure.

The most important part of writing is re-writing. This lesson teaches your young writer how to use the critiques they receive in their re-writing process. We share advice and editing strategies for you and your young writer to try out!

Action Items:

• It might be helpful to take a look again at the Critique Continuum handout from lesson 2, to reflect on the initial goals of critique. That handout is also attached below for your convenience. :)

• For young writers, try incorporating at least one critique into your draft today. Do so in a separate document or another piece of paper so you can try out any edits while still keeping the original intact. How does it feel to change your story in big or small ways?

You’ve worked through story-wide edits and plenty of smaller critiques together. Now your young writer is ready to polish and perfect their story through line edits - the very last step in editing a story! In this lesson, we share tips and tricks for how to make the line editing process as efficient as possible.

Action Items:

• Discuss the line editing techniques mentioned. What seems helpful to your young writer?

There comes a time in every young writer’s life when they want to get feedback on their writing from someone besides their friends and family. This lesson teaches you and your young writer how to successfully seek out critiques from outside sources such as writing groups, writing instructors, and local nonprofits.

A couple writing nonprofits

• SCBWI - Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators

• Austin Bat Cave (Example of local nonprofit)

• The Loft Literacy Center

The list above isn’t an exhaustive list of writing groups to check out - they’re just a couple to give you a better understanding of what’s out there! Try searching for groups and nonprofits in your state or region, but don’t be afraid to reach out to groups in other places as well.” Suggest googling NAME OF CITY + WRITING GROUP

Action Items:

• Have a conversation with your young writer about outside critiques. Are they interested in them? What kinds of critiques are they hoping to receive?

• With your young writer, brainstorm some ways to show appreciation for the critiquers in their life. How can you and your young writer both respect the people giving their time in critiques?

If you've never participated in a writing critique before, haven't had much practice with critiques focused on strengths, or aren't sure what we mean by a Compliment Sandwich, this video is for you!

We start the critiquing session by modeling ways to use the Critiquing Continuum Handout to identify what the writer hopes to gain from the critique.

We then use sections of the Critiquing Considerations Handout to show critiques of both prose and poetry pieces. If you want to follow along, both of these pieces are linked in the Resources section below.

Throughout these critiques, we show how to provide feedback to a writer using the Compliment Sandwich method, detailed in the Compliment Sandwich Handout available in the Resources section.

Action Items:

• A great starting point for any critique is a discussion about what the writer hopes to gain from the critique. The Critiquing Continuum Handout, available in the Resources section below, can help with this discussion.

• The Critiquing Considerations Handout, also available below, can guide both the discussion and the critique process.

• When sharing critiques with a writer, make sure to use the Compliment Sandwich method, illustrated in the Compliment Sandwich Handout below. This method starts and ends a critique by highlighting which pieces worked well so they "sandwich" details about what could be improved.

• Have a question about the critique process? Reach out to us.

Looking for fresh writing prompts? Check out our Writing Prompts Handout..

New to using writing prompts? Looking for fresh ways to use writing prompts? Interested in using writing prompts to strengthen your writing? Check out this video!

Action Items:

• Use the prompts in the Writing Prompts Handout below to build up your writing muscles, warm up before a writing session, target a specific skill, or help you get out of a writing rut.

• We want to celebrate your creations! Share what you wrote using one (or more!) of these prompts by commenting below.

Submitting your work can be daunting. Okay, scary!

But placing your focus on things you can control, like where and when you should submit your carefully written and polished pieces, rather than things you cannot control, like whether others will select your piece for publication or a contest, gives you more power over your writing.

Not only will you gain agency, you will also have more energy for your writing and will increase the amount of fun you have writing.

Tracking your submissions also allows you to celebrate along the way. It's easy to lose sight of how much progress you've made but the tracker serves as a great reminder. And the courage needed to submit deserves to be celebrated!

Action Items:

• Download the 100 Submissions Handout from the Resources section below.

• Experiment with ways to use the handout to track your submissions. (You can also use this handout as a writing tracker.) Discover which methods work best for you!

• Submitting your work takes a lot of bravery. Celebrate each and every time you submit your writing.

• Let us know how you use the handout so we can all learn from and celebrate with each other.

You’ve completed the course! Pat yourself on the back, and know that you and your young writer are taking great steps towards being confident critiquers and writers.

Action Items:

• Celebrate!

• If you have suggestions, feedback, or critiques of your own to give us on this course just let us know in the comments.

If you’d like to check out more resources for young writers, try out the books in our Resources Section).

• Rip the Page! Adventures in Creative Writing by Karen Benke

• Writer to Writer by Gail Carson Levine

• Spilling Ink by Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter