Fourth Group Meeting

This meeting we all headed back to our original meeting spot, the comfy seats of the library, with a refreshed attitude after our long weekend away from school. In our opening discussion, the one in which we reflected upon the “Summary and Sayback” techniques introduced last group meeting, we all agreed that Sayback seemed the most useful to our writing process since the last meeting in that Sayback encouraged collaboration between the writer and the “critic” or reader. That is, rather than a one-sided discussion in which the reader gave feedback and the writer listened passively, we felt that the Sayback method of providing a writer with feedback really inspired the reader and writer to work together to improve the piece of writing at hand. Following this discussion, we moved to the second major activity on our agenda: crafting questions to guide the feedback on the new pieces of writing we brought to the meeting to discuss. We passed out our pieces to each other, silently read them, and then reflected upon the question posed by the writer. After everyone had finished reading all of the new writing, we discussed each piece individually, using the question posed by the writer as the basis of our discussion. I think all of us benefited greatly from crafting these questions before giving feedback in that the questions really focused the feedback each reader presented to the writer and kept the discussions about each of our pieces to improvement oriented critique. Further, it was especially nice to craft these questions for each other because it meant that each of us got to hear about what we most wanted to better understand versus what was convenient or easy to discuss. This being our fourth meeting together, I think we are really beginning to better understand each others’ writing styles and approaches to material and this meeting was another productive and inspiring period of reflection and discussion about writing.

Allison

Third Group Meeting

Our third group meeting brought us outside where we were able to enjoy the wonderful afternoon sun. While sitting on the benches outside the theater, we first read the summary and sayback exercises. After reading, we made sure that everyone had a clear understanding of each method. This led to a discussion on how these methods would be helpful for the revision process and led us to see both the similarities and differences between the two. While the summary method allows the writer to hear the reader's interpretation of their piece's main message, we ultimately thought sayback was more useful. There is a more evident conversation between the reader and the writer through sayback, allowing the reader to help the writer think of new words and thoughts for their piece. As all of us have experienced before, there are some ideas that the writer is trying to get down that may not be clear to the reader. We were able to use the sayback method to describe what the goals and strategies for our pieces were and the ways that we could make them more effective for the reader. Overall, we all enjoyed working with the two methods while sitting outside. We also concluded that each of us would read our individual topics instead of a group read.

Aaron