Free Advice on Writing Samples

…for writing workshop applications, specifically!

I was a reader for this year’s Clarion West six-week summer workshop (please don’t ask me if I read your application or how I scored anything, I mostly don’t remember anyway) and now that this year’s class has been announced (congrats y’all!), I need to vent about a very personal pet peeve.

NOTA BENE: This is a very specific idiosyncrasy (it’s not you, it’s me), and it also did NOT affect how I judged anyone’s actual writing–so if you’ve done t...