Abstract: “Workers and peasants singing their own stories” refers not only to life and work sung in the literary tradition through ballads, but also to the actual writing about life experiences and emotions through newspapers, magazines and correspondence by the workers and peasants themselves. In its process of popularizing literature and art, Popular Exercises took over the idea, from the League of Left-wing Writers, to cultivate popular authors from the masses of workers and peasants and carried out concrete practice in newspapers and correspondent networks in the Yan’an base area. Through columns like “Original and Adapted Works” and “Instructional Articles,” this magazine offered writing guidance in a variety of areas ranging from standardizing punctuation marks, revising sentences to cultivating styles. While improving the writing abilities of worker and peasant authors, the editors paid attention to preserving the authors’ original popular language, folk forms and personal experiences. Such efforts of Yan’an’s literary and art workers were aimed to cultivate “worker and peasant writers” with basic writing skills who could embody the true character of the masses. Due to wartime austerity, inadequate literary proficiency of the authors and insufficient editorial resources of the magazine, this training mode was not without incompleteness and limitations.

Key words: Popular Exercises, training of worker and peasant writer, popularization of arts and literature, writing of the workers and peasants, writing guidance