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IWW Practice-W Exercise Archives
Exercise:
Free-for-all (Version 4)

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writers Workshop (http://www.internetwritingwor kshop.org/).

Prepared by: Rhéal Nadeau
Posted on: March 3, 2002
Reposted on: May 12, 2002
Reposted on: December 1, 2002
Reposted on: January 12, 2003
Reposted on: March 30, 2003

Once again, rather than posting a new exercise this week, we will open up the list to the exercise of your choice.

You can create your own exercise - in that case, describe the exercise intent briefly and clearly at the top of your submission, so people know what to focus on.

Or you can do one of our previous exercises (or a variant of one) - be it an exercise you missed, or one you'd like to redo. You can find the previous exercises at http://www.internetwritingworkshop.org/pwarchive/index.shtml In this case, include a brief statement of the exercise, and ideally the URL of the exercise description, at the top of your submission.

The choice is up to you.

Remember - the free-for-alls are a great opportunity to make sure you meet the monthly participation requirements!

When critiquing, remember to pay attention to how well the submission satisfies the requirements of the exercise, as well as to general writing issues. For example, if the exercise deals with involving the senses (as last week's exercise did), then highlight good uses of the senses, and places where they could have been used more effectively.


Rhéal Nadeau's wrap-up
Posted on: Sunday, May 19, 2002

As I always do, I enjoyed the range of submissions during this free-for-all week. We saw people doing exercises they'd missed (including exercises posted before they joined), or redoing an exercise. Best of all, we saw some new exercises (the "Remembering sadness" exercise I've just posted was inspired by one of the "Remembering" submissions this week, and I hope to be able to use the "Far-out imagination" exercise one of these weeks.)

When I started doing the Free-for-all exercises, I was running them every three months. Seeing how successful these are, I think I'll do them for often - every two months, perhaps.

I think I'll say a bit about how we choose exercises to run. Since this is our second year, we expect to repeat one of the previous exercises (or an evolution of one) about every second week. We try to have one new exercise per month, at least. And of course, we'll have at least one Remembering exercise or one Free-for-all every month.

If you have suggestions on exercises you'd like to see, how often you'd prefer to have a free-for-all, or any other issues relating to exercise selection, please feel free to contact us as practice-w-request@lists.psu.edu. (Of course, new exercise ideas are always welcome as well!)

Congratulations to everyone who participated this week - good work overall!

Rhéal


Rhéal Nadeau's wrap-up
Posted on: January 19, 2003

A good, and varied, week. It was nice to see people take on different challenges (including one brand-new exercise, which I plan to steal in order to use it one of these weeks. :-) )

However, please remember that the point of doing any exercise is to focus on one aspect of writing. Some submissions did not come with a statement of what they were focusing on (or a vague label), which made them harder to critique. For the same reason, when doing a previous exercise, it is important to follow its instructions exactly - or if modifying it, to say in what way that is being done.

Rhéal




Web site created by Rhéal Nadeau and the administrators of the Internet Writing Workshop.
Modified by Gayle Surrette.