Critical Meeting Reflection

Whereas the think-aloud protocol provided a view into my planning stage, the critical incidents interview expanded my knowledge of how I construct the representation of what I do as a writer. Critical incident interviews require a writer to analyze the power structure of a writing act for the incidents and issues that arise while he or she is talking through the situation. The initial practice of critical incidents enabled me to perform an analysis of my taped interview with a collaborative planning partner whose questions forced me to study the strategies I was using as a writer. I witnessed the negotiation of having a new relationship toward writing in graduate school when my default strategies started to fail. From collaborative planning

I discuss my background as a writer, referring to “my literary analysis work” that I have already received a degree in, but I am in school once again in a lower power relation with a professor. However, I have chosen to move back to the roots of my studies on a subject area that I had written my thesis on, causing a conflicted understanding of what I can do as a writer. In my critical incidents issue, the negotiation occurs between the feeling that I am both a novice to sociolinguistic papers, and so beholden to my professor, while being an expert in the subject

My first has been an avoidance strategy where I produce text when I can avoid the inner critic, and the other one is creating situations where I do not feel hounded by constraints. At times, I will create situations where the constraints of writing a text do not exist. As such, I write outside the final document, telling myself that I will write an average of 800 words about the topic. I pretend there is no time limit, and even if I do not have usable content at the end of the exercise, it was not a waste because it allowed me to write through my thinking. Lastly, I learned while studying my process that I have a weakness in the logic of my organization, which led me to try reverse outlining. It does not disrupt how I am used to writing, but provides an alternate strategy to account for this weakness I now know I possess. In the same way, metacognivitely studying oneself, whether as a professional writer or student, can provide similar insights into weaknesses in the process, which writers can then experiment with strategies to get themselves through these specific