Illumination Writers | Relationships
Writers Workshop, at Slack — Illumination
A Mentoring Initiative
At Illumination, we are dedicated to helping our writers improve their craft.
We have created a new program that will be on our Slack platform, to assist you in your writing practice.
Writers Workshop is a one on one mentoring service offered by some of our editors on Illumination.
It’s intended for new writers or writers that need a bit of focused assistance for a short time on a specific story or technique.
This mentoring is happening right now, but it’s occurring in the queue, as the writer and editor are corresponding using private notes. That’s a bit cumbersome, so we’ve found a way to improve it.
We’d like to move that one on one mentoring service, over to our Slack workspace called Illuminationglobal.slack.com.
Joining Slack at Illumination is worth it.
At Illumination, we use Slack to get to know each other and provide support.
We have created a designated channel in Slack, where editors and specific writers could meet and work on specific stories before they are submitted to the queue.
The channel is called #writers-workshop
This is a pre-publish stop where articles can be reviewed and edited.
There are two ways a writer may be selected for the workshop.
- An editor may invite a writer that wants or needs editorial advice to post their articles on the channel before they submit them to be published.
- Writers can submit a request for mentoring in the channel #request-for-mentoring.
- The request should include: How many years you’ve been writing, and if you need general assistance or assistance with a specific article. Tell us what you are looking for.
- Writers requesting mentoring must be willing to accept feedback and work to improve their writing.
- It’s up to editors whether they can accept new writers to coach as we do have busy schedules and may not always be available.
A couple of caveats.
- Participation in the #writers-workshop is by invitation only.
- Writers requesting mentoring may not be selected immediately as we have a limited number of volunteer editors available.
- Interested writers need to be a member of Illumination-Slack to make the request on the channel.
- This initiative is not intended to be a permanent solution for everything you write. Rather it is a one-off learning opportunity to help you to make progress as a writer.
- It is support for a single article, not an ongoing review process for every single piece that you submit. Should you fail to respond to this help in a positive and constructive manner we reserve the right to remove you from the #writers-workshop channel.
Behind the Scenes Details
All editors are members of the channel #writers-workshop.
As an editor connects with a writer, they will add them to the Slack channel #writers-workshop and invite them to post their article there for editing.
The writer would remove their article from the Q (if it was there) and then go to Slack and post it there, tagging their editor friend.
The editor now has a place to work with the writer. Once the writer ‘graduates’ the editor may remove them from the channel to keep the numbers small.
This program was originally created in May 2020, by Dr. Mehmet Yildiz. It was enthusiastically adopted by a smaller group of writers and editors within the submission queue.
Now we are using Slack to direct our efforts. and to focus on the activity of the Writers-Workshop in one place.
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