Writers’ workshops are used by the pattern community to improve our patterns and other manuscripts. These workshops are the primary focus of our time at PLoP and in them we discuss accepted papers. Authors are assigned to a writers’ workshop and are expected to attend all sessions in that workshop. All other conference attendees are encouraged to attend one or more writers’ workshop sessions, preferably choosing to read and review papers where they can contribute. Paper assignments to workshops are posted before the conference.
The format of writers’ workshops has been adapted from the creative writing community. Each writers’ workshop contains a handful of papers, which authors must read before the conference to be able to give each other feedback on their work in a peer review session of around one hour per paper—short papers (7 pages or less) are reviewed for 1/2 hour. Richard Gabriel has written both a book and a pattern language on writers workshops. The pattern language is a good place to start.
Each writers’ workshop is led by a moderator. In each session, the author or authors of the paper under discussion remain (mostly) silent while the others discuss it and explain insights and views they have about it. Depending on the workshop moderation style, authors may be brought into the discussion to gain insight and clarity about their work. From these sessions, authors get much feedback and many suggestions about how they can improve their work.
A fruitful participation in a writers’ workshop session requires each participant to read the papers in advance and to take some notes on what was liked about the papers and what needs improvement. Because there’s no reading time during the writers’ workshops—experience shows that chatting with others or meeting people is much more fun than being alone reading papers—do yourself a favor and read the papers of your writers’ workshop in advance.
Structure of a Writer’s Workshop
The writers’ workshop format is a particularly effective method to review, evaluate, and improve pattern descriptions. The general structure of a writers’ workshop has a group of discussants read the paper carefully before the session. During the workshop, the discussants examine the strengths and weaknesses of each paper, accentuating positive aspects and suggesting improvements in content and style.
Although the author is present, he or she remains “invisible” during most of the discussion. The author is expected to take notes and/or have someone take notes for them during the discussion (so they can concentrate on the discussion). Many reviewers also give their marked-up copies of the paper to the authors with further written comments. These comments are intended to help the author improve the paper, but the author is not obliged to follow all the suggestions. The entire process normally takes about an hour per paper—short papers (7 pages or less) are reviewed for 1/2 hour.
Ensuring appropriate atmosphere is important. Workshop participants are expected to act professionally and courteously towards each other and towards the author during a workshop. The goal is to ensure that participants feel comfortable sharing their insights and suggestions for improvement. We all feel uneasy when our work is being evaluated, and so authors will feel nervous under the best of circumstances. If workshop attendees are too critical then the author might feel so bad that they will probably never want to come back to PLoP.
It is the responsibility of the moderator to ensure the atmosphere of the workshop is constructive and conducive to insightful discussions. Moreover, it’s important to stress the positive aspects of the paper as much as offering constructive criticism.