Critiques hard work, but worth it.

In mid-August my boss called and told me to pack my bags, I was going to the NCEW Convention in Portland.

Never mind that I wasn't a member yet, had only been writing editorials for a year, and didn't know anyone at any other papers. Okay, I was cool with that. A free ride to a beautiful city. How hard could that be?

Then he added, "I signed you up for the critique session."

Yikes. That would be work, I guessed.

I was right. But it was well worth the effort.

The thing to know about the NCEW critique session is: Most of the work needs to be done before you get there. I started behind the timeline and spent a few frantic days pestering Sherid Virnig to accept my NCEW membership, then Dick Hughes to wedge me into a critique group.

Going through my newspapers, it was easy enough to pick samples because the critique required particular editorials: an election endorsement, an editorial where we tried something different, a mix of local/non-local, and two random days in June.

That weekend I drove my son to college, dumped him at the dorm, and spent an hour at Kinko's running copies of the papers. Found an open post office and mailed them off. Whew! Done.

Except that turned out to be the least of the work.

As the packages from my critique session members began arriving in the mail, I gave them a first read during odd times of my day. But to be fair to my critique mates, I knew I had to find some uninterrupted hours to read them a second or third time. I stayed late a couple nights, with only the security guard to distract me. It was challenging to focus on issues I knew nothing about in cities I'd never visited, but I enjoyed figuratively looking over the shoulders of other editorial writers.

I typed up critiques of two newspapers and jotted critique notes on the other two, then crammed everything into my suitcase.

In Portland, the five of us spent most of a day in a room, talking shop like the trench warriors we are: Letter writers make us crazy, but we depend on them. Local officials pull boneheaded moves and then complain when we write about it. There's too much to do but we love our jobs.

Sound familiar?

In the midst of all that, we managed to dissect everyone's pages. The members in my group had put a good bit of time and thought into the critiques, which made for an interesting discussion.

The value of the critiques comes from the entire process. I learned as much about my own writing by reading the other papers as I did from the critiques. Perhaps it's human nature to recognize our own weaknesses only when they're on someone else's page. Too weak a stance here, too passive voice there, "duty editorial" on this page.

I came through the session feeling energized about writing and impassioned about editorializing. And I got a chance to spend a day with four new comrades.

Patricia Biggs is an editorial writer for The Arizona Republic. E-mail patricia.biggs@ arizonarepublic.com