Group Meeting #7

In this last meeting we met in the library. We started off by reading "Movies of the Reader's Mind" and, once we finished, tried to understand how exactly to apply this to a piece. We decided to try to apply it to Christina's piece since her piece was new and we though that the initial impressions we would give of our "movie" would be more helpful. Her piece was the beginning of a short story and we found that our "movies" were fairly accurate with what she was trying to convey.
We finished doing Christina's piece and still had time, so we decided to apply the same procedure to Hadler's piece because it too was a new piece. After doing this Hadler realized that his piece had not had the same effect he had hoped. He wanted a more "creepy" description, while we seemed to envision a more lively setting.
Once we finished with this we decided to discuss the effects our meetings have had on our revisions. We all agreed that we revise according to the feedback we get from our group mates. We agreed that this is one of the first things we usually look for when a revise a piece. We also discussed that our revisions most often are reflective of the agenda you give us for the meetings. We all agreed that we find some slightly more applicable than others, (We all felt that the "asking a question" procedure was very beneficial and resulted in fruitful feedback that was directly applicable to our own concerns about our piece.) In general, we were all using each others feedback to improve and feel that these group meetings are very helpful in furthering our writing.

Group Meeting #6

Sorry about the late post.
For our most recent group meeting, we met in the cafeteria. We lacked one member, Christina, but still had a successful meeting. We began by reading the Criterion-Based Feedback handout, which detailed how to give feedback about the structure and style of one another's writing. We had three new pieces to look over. Leo continued to add to his story, Tal had a new one about her wisdom tooth removal, and Rachel had a new poem. Questions surrounding Leo's piece were about the change in paragraph length and length of sentences. The beginning has a series of short paragraphs with a few longer ones at the end. Almost all of the sentences are on the shorter side. The question was whether the other members of the group felt this needed to be tinkered with. The general opinion was that it worked, but that it would be good to continue with longer paragraphs and add in some longer sentences. Rachel's piece was made up of equal length stanzas, and we all agreed this worked.
Overall it was a succesful meeting.

In our group meeting we first took a few minutes to craft our own questions that we wanted answered in our pieces. Next, we read "6. Voice" and although we each came up with different quotes which jumped off the page, one which everyone agreed on was "...They'll have an easier time if you are willing to invite them to exaggerate or play around a bit: to read it as if they were whining or arrogant or depressed, or whatever the voice suggests to them." We understood that the purpose of the reading was to read out loud (maybe several times) to literally hear the voice within the piece. The discussion of the "five star quotes" led to a conversation about our own questions. For instance, Hadeler declared that he needed more description and dialogue in his piece. We told him he definitely had enough description, but perhaps he did need more dialogue. We believed that the dialogue would help add to the voice of the his piece. In this piece and in previous ones, he became defined as a relaxed and casual writer, gradually becoming more descriptive. We attempted to discuss each group member's voice after reading their pieces aloud, but had some trouble finding good words to describe the voice.