Writer's Workshops are the way in which patterns are reviewed with an eye to improving them. Improving them means making them more easily understood to the reader. The ideas of the pattern should be expressed well as written. You should not need to go to the author to understand what was said in the pattern.
The format for a Writer's Workshop is similar yet different than an ordinary design inspection. Each has its place.
A Writer's Workshop is intended to be a positive experience for the author. To accomplish that, the discussion begins with the moderator asking what they reviewers liked about the pattern.
Further towards making it a positive useful experience is the rule that reviewers may not just say that they didn't like something. All such comments must be worded as a suggestion for improvement.
A big difference between design inspections and Writer's Workshops is that in a Workshop, the author of the pattern may only speak at specific times! If it isn't in the pattern, the author may not add it. Among other benefits, this prevents the workshop from dragging on indefinitely due to the dialog.
A presumption at a Writer's Workshop is that all of the participants at the workshop are themselves pattern authors. This contributes to the level of trust, because any back-stabbing can be repaid at a later date.
Writer's Workshops have been used to review patterns since the first Pattern Language of Program Design Conference (PLOP) in 1994. This method has proven itself to be an effective way to improve patterns.
-- Bob Hanmer
ENHANCEMENTS DESIRED -- How would you change this to convey to people new to patterns how they are reviewed?
For a more detailed description of the culture surroundingWritersWorkshops, see Writers Workshop Patterns.
The Plop Conference (Ward Cunningham, program chair) introduced the writer's workshop to the field of computing.
Here's a brief but good explanation of how to run a Writers Workshop, "How to Hold a Writer's Workshop"
www.cs.wustl.edu 
Jim Coplien has written on the process:
The workshop format and a lot more are explained in an excellent book:
Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things by Richard Gabriel
images.amazon.com
ISBN: 020172183X
Related
See original on c2.com