Writing Workshop: Helpful or Hell?

Photo by Middlesex School

A staple of the Middlesex experience, Writing Workshop, has been around for decades to torture all sophomores and new juniors. As all who have endured it know well, Writing Workshop consists of two parts, the objective test and the paragraph test, both of which attempt to measure a student’s writing prowess. The objective test mainly focuses on grammar and “clear and effective” sentences, while the infamous paragraph test gauges one’s ability to write effective assertions and create theses that sufficiently climb the notorious “ladder of abstraction.” While the program is intended to mold Middlesex students into world-class writers, for many, it merely increases the stress they feel in an already hectic Middlesex life. So does Writing Workshop really have the benefits it is claimed to possess?

For esteemed Middlesex faculty member, revered member of the social sciences department, and proud Middlesex alumnus, Mr. Hoar, the answer is decidedly yes. On the first day of my American History class, while explaining to my class the process of writing history papers, Mr. Hoar reminded us of the importance of what we had learned in Writing Workshop, and he advised us to heed the wise advice our teachers had given us during the course as it would vastly improve our history writing. He then proceeded to pull out his nearly 20-year-old Writing Workshop binder and told us how he kept this binder on his desk all the way through college when writing essays. If a man as smart as Mr. Hoar sees value in and still uses the lessons learned from the program, surely we should listen to what we learned in the course and appreciate its value.

Mr. Hoar feels that Writing Workshop is not only beneficial to one's development in the English classroom, but that it is important to one’s academic progression as a whole. He contends that it “teaches you a set of techniques adaptable to different disciplines.” He feels that many of the lessons learned from Mr. Hirsch and Jecca can be applied to history writing, or really any writing. 

This support for the program is shared by many of its alumni. Will Frank ‘25 regards the program as “integral to his development as a writer.” For Felix Motta ‘25, Writing Workshop helped to “transform [his] ideas from the simple and shallow thoughts about books to ideas of great sophistication and complexity.” Clearly many students view Writing Workshop as a transformative experience that was crucial to developing their writing skills.

However, for some students, Writing Workshop is viewed as an unnecessary burden. For Jeffery Hernandez ’25, the program has added unnecessary stress to his life as he has yet to pass the paragraph test, yet he remains hopeful that his luck will change this Friday when he retakes it. He feels that he “didn’t learn that much [in the class] that [he] hadn’t already learned in [his] English class.” Thus for some, the benefits of Writing Workshop appear small especially in comparison to the anguish it causes.

While there are certainly many opinions about the benefits of Writing Workshop, all with their own merit, I believe that Writing Workshop at large is beneficial to students. It forces them to actually improve their writing and not merely coast along with subpar grades on essays, and it helps to develop the crucial skill of effective writing, something which they will surely value later in their life. I certainly benefited from my experience with Mr. Hirsch, and I believe that Writing Workshop is a tenet of Middlesex that should go nowhere.

Davis Hale