I think one of the smarter and more useful tips/rules/&c. Boice recommends is "As you read-to-write, engage in a writerly conversation with yourself. Carry on a dialogue by responding to what you have noted and written with more notes [perhaps by entering asides and afterthoughts in brackets]." Perhaps I think it is a smart and useful tip because I try to take myriad notes already. I generally mark up my books with my thoughts, my interpretations, and my moments of disbelief--be warned, I don't recommend borrowing a book from me unless you would like to read many scrawled "Wha?" in the margins. But what struck me as something I don't do enough and should do more is commenting on my own notes. I love the idea of constantly going back over pieces and responding to yourself. As writers, I think we tend to do this always already, but we internalize it and put down a final product sans that dialogue. I've tried in the past to use the "show markup" feature on Microsoft Office and see what I've changed throughout my writing process and I have tried to respond to it. At the time, I felt like I was wasting time and not really writing, but here I recognize I was actually participating in an exercise to facilitate my imagination. Neat.


From Boice, I found a similar thread in Rodgers/Dewey. There, Rodgers interprets one of Dewey's "criter[ion] for reflection" as, "Reflection is a meaning-making process that moves a learner from one experience into the next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and connections to other experiences and ideas." I love how Rodgers and Dewey understand the learning process as a complicated act that involves past, present, and future. Reflection is not just looking back on something, but it is a rigorous process involving the understanding of one's experience in the present and looking back at an experience in the past to, hopefully, create a more meaningful/substantial future experience. I believe this is the benefit and ultimate product from Boice's tip of "engag[ing] in a writerly conversation with yourself." I think, too, reflection here is an intentional process. By that I mean we engage in a reflection with a sort of purpose to it. We don't just look back for the sake of looking back, but we look back for a reason. Sometimes I feel that the intentionality in reflection gets lost either in the class or in the individual. All in all, I hope to continue to make even more notes, and add notes upon those notes.