Will Hochman

English 201

Fall 2003

1) What is the text’s (poem’s or story’s) literal situation? Is there something in your understanding of the literal situation in the text that helps set up good writing or interferes?

2) Who are the characters? What do you know about them and their relationships to other characters and voices in the writing? In a poem, what is the character of the voice?

3) How thoroughly are the characters developed? Do you see aspects of the character that are phony? Do you imagine aspects of the character that you can creatively add?

4) What is the setting? In other words, what do you understand of the world from the poem or story and what do you imagine adding or subtracting from that world? Is there a clear point of view?

5) What happens? How do things turn out? Are the twists and turns you really like? Are there alternatives you can suggest? Is the poem or story in need of more plotting?

6) What is the text’s trigger? What is the text’s real subject? What is the text saying about the subject and how well is it saying it to you?

7) What are the most effective metaphors and similes? Where are the weak ones? Can you suggest any metaphors or similes that may work in the poem?

8) How well are the metaphors, similes, sounds, lines, images, and voice. helping you see the point of the text? What line or lines really help you know what you are seeing in the writing? What sense of voice do you get from the writing? Can you characterize this sense of voice?

9) What are the text’s’s key images? Why do you like them or not? Can you see the image because of the craft involved with the wording, lines, sounds, ideas or feeling? Explaining your way of seeing to the poet will help show her or him how well the image is working.

10) Can you point to any problems with your process of seeing the image so the poet may craft the image more powerfully?

11) Can you suggest alternative ways to develop images in the poem?

12) What are the best sounds in the poems? Can you point to the rhythms, rhymes, lines, words and sounds that enable you to hear the "music" in the writing? What sounds are clunkers? Can you suggest alternative word choice or placement to improve the sound in the text?

13) Is there dialog? How well does it work? If you could add some dialog, what would it be?

14) What are the best lines? Can you explain how you liked them in terms of meaning and placement?

15) What are the weakest lines? Can you explain why they don’t work well.

16) Do you see a chance to do more showing and less telling? Where? Why? How?

17) Does the text begin well? Can you focus your comment on the title and first line of the text so the writer knows if these beginning elements are effective?

18) Does text end well? Do you see an alternative title or slant to the text to suggest to the writer?

19) Is the form of the text well suited for the subject? What would happen if the same material was used in a different form?

20) How can the writing be improved? What does the text really mean and what questions did the writing make you want to ask?