This is the lively, effective approach to the teaching of writing that:

• This lively, effective classroom and conferencing approach uses inclass exercises and activities that help the broad diversity of students and writers on all levels to enjoy the professional and personal benefits of being able to confidently approach the writing and problem-solving challenges of school, business, life, and career
• Helps students and writers on all levels discover and develop their voices, their imagination, their background, and experience, their creative problem-solving abilities, their stories, in compelling writing.

About Story Workshop approaches, Peter Elbow, the well-known writing teacher and author, said that the Story Workshop approach "is powerful and too little explored."

Beverlye Brown, Assistant Dean of Instruction at Maplewood Community College in Kansas City, Missouri, spoke for experienced teachers when she said of John Schultz's book Writing from Start to Finish: "Writing from Start to Finish sets out the clearest and most comprehensive composition theory that I'm aware of today, powerfully developing the connections among thinking, speaking, reading, writing, and listening."

Teachers of all kinds of writing classes have adopted Writing from Start to Finish for their student's use and taken suggestions, exersizes, and wisdom from Story Workshop approaches and The Teacher's Manual for Writing from Start to Finish.

"YOU CAN IDENTIFY the Story Workshop method of teaching writing by its structured, flexible time-period format; by its theory of seeing and voice; by its repertoire of oral word, oral telling, oral reading, writing and recall exercises; by its semicircle format, which heightens and facilitates the group process and the sense of audience; and by its teaching approaches, techniques, strategies, and tactics made possible by the exercises and their many variations. Used in class sessions and in one-to-one tutorial sessions, the Story Workshop method assumes that all forms of writing derive from image and story, from image and movement of voice organizing the expression of perceptions through time. The development of these human perceptual, imaginative, and verbal capacities through their many derivations in oral and written forms is always the Story Workshop objective." From "The Story Workshop Method Writing From Start to Finish," by John Schultz (College English Vol. 39, No. 4, Dec. 1977)

Measured Results of Story Workshop Classes

The Story Workshop approach has been used on all levels and is modified to meet the needs of each level. In cases that have been tested comprehensively comparing results from classes of several teachers (in a major urban community college system over fourteen full semesters) 90% of the Story Workshop trained students passed a rigorous post-test successfully (two hours of argumentative writing), while only 50% to 70% of students from other traditional and ad hoc composition classes in the same college passed the test. See also quantified results of Story Workshop Composition classes in "My Own Voice: Students Say it Unlocks the Writing Process," by Zoe Keithley, in the Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. II, No. 2, 1992. See Story Workshop Anthologies

Reviewer Comments on Story Workshop Student Writings

The following are typical comments by writers, reviewers, and educators on reading the student writings in Story Workshop anthologies (The Story Workshop Reader, Hair Trigger (annual), F Magazine, and The Best of Hair Trigger).

"Both books [The Story Workshop Reader and Angels In My Oven] are fascinating and impressive evidence of the success of your [Story] Workshop methods. A sense of life, a sense of literary process being ripened and developed quickens nearly every piece I read. These are clearly students bringing the best of their powers to bear on the writing task while those powers are being extended in a most wonderful variety of directions. The discipline rises from the vigorous immersion of the writers with their material--as it should."
-R.V. Cassill, Brown University, Author of Doctor Cobb's Game and The Goss Women

"The Freshman English section of f1 will astound anyone who has ever had to teach or take that agonizing course."
-Chicago Review

"Hair Trigger walks away with first prize. The magazine is of the highest quality...The writing is thoughtful, realistic, sensual, exciting, and within the vein of the best traditions of American literature...exhibiting a high level of professionalism and seriousness... full of solid, memorable surprises... a most pleasant experience to run across such a variety of themes and subject matters within a single magazine."
-From judge's comments on 1993 First Place Award to Hair Trigger 14, in the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) national competition for literary magazines

Go to Story Workshop Anthologies

Comments from Business and the Professions

"Story and voice convey the power of your message; they are the stock-in-trade of the communications professional. Columbia College's Story Workshop approach helped me to discover my voice. John Schultz's program develops the key to effective communication--the storyteller's sense of heightened language and lively expression." - Rich Cantrall, Communications Mangaer, American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons

"The Story Workshop method is unique in its ability to help you see better, hear better, and, as a result, write better. The innovative classroom techniques encourage participation and help you develop your writing skills to their fullest." - Chuck Rudnick, Vice President and Creative Director, Foote, Cone & Belding

See Programs for Business and Careers

Fully realized Story Workshop classes, workshops, and other groups are conducted by a Certified Story Workshop Master Teacher, Certified Story Workshop Director, or Candidate, or persons using Story Workshop techniques under the supervision of a Story Workshop Master Teacher or Story Workshop Director. Central to the Story Workshop approach are activities conducted and coached by a Story Workshop Director, usually facing a semi-circle arrangement of students.

The Story Workshop Director is responsible for the direction of the Story Workshop approach's flexible, organized repertoire of recall, word, oral telling, oral reading, and inclass and out-of-class writing and reading exercises and coachings. Story Workshop exercises and formats, with appropriate coachings, are named and structured in various publications and videotape presentations. The Story Workshop director's direction of Story Workshop activities helps students integrate and explore on every level, in every activity, processes of seeing-in-the-mind/thinking/creative problem-solving and voice, abstractive image and organizing movement of voice, immediate audience and inner listening, and sense of form and point of view. Story Workshop activities usually result in verbal expression, but are not limited to oral/gestural and written language as the media of expression; other arts and disciplines in which Story Workshop approaches can be used may provide results specific to the media of those fields.

Story Workshop groups usually meet in a semi-circle facing a Story Workshop director, but are not limited to semi-circle seating arrangements. Story Workshop one-to-one and tutorial conference techniques are identified by their use of Story Workshop coachings, principles, and specific exercises (e.g., juxtaposed readings). Story Workshop approaches may be used by a Story Workshop director on all levels of education from pre-school through graduate school and other adult groups.

All of the above is related to, but not limited to, verbal expression, written and spoken. Written shall also be assumed to refer to electronic hypertext forms of writing, in short, to whatever forms of writing are meant to be visible and speakable and to take their meaning primarily from elements of speech and from being voiced from one person to another or others. Or are understood to be voiced, in some way.

For more information on how to get Story Workshop training, see The Story Workshop Institute.