Different students may work in different ways and yet all be right.
I hoped you wouldn't respond with that quote, because I had considered whether it applied, and concluded no it doesn't.
And I say it does. And I had hoped, and please excuse my upcoming rant about this and don't take it personally(it's more me talking to a past version of myself for the most part), you would not respond in that manner as there is that tendency(entirely my fault because the urge to reply is strong in me) that this will just lead to long-winding, tedious and rather pointless 'you said/I said/he said' arguments, wasting a lot of time collecting 'facts' or verbalizing thoughts and concepts and interpretations(all prone to be understood in a different way as they were meant on both ends)
instead of drawing and I am not available to have these kinds of discussions neither in this thread, any other, nor in PM.
I consider it a complete waste of time and mostly just ego-driven(my ego, perhaps yours too) jibber-jabber or technobabble, throw in over-thinking and over-analyzing if you want, spawned by the ego's urge to be 'right' and perhaps even coming from the rather pointless hope for some nebulous form of praise from society/community or any authority figure as a whole, that 'good dog, have a cookie' pat on the back (all of which one should want to free themselves for the sake of being a free man). I think the primary point of importance in all the exercises is not arriving at a specific depiction of something but to go through the exercises, to make the observations and feeling the things, building the muscle memory, gaining the knowledge and the experience (and here again I think I wrote about this before in here).
The exercise results that are left in the mind(all the non-visual parts, the concepts formed beyond verbalization, depiction and (over)analysis, the parts in the mind, wherever they might be located, which are responsible for keeping understanding of the things perceived through the sensations of touch and movement) are what it is about, whereas the marks that are left on paper are merely evidence(and I mean this in a judgement-free and neutral sense of the word, not in the sense of having to worry about proving anything to anyone(including oneself)) of having gone through the exercise but they are meaningless afterwards and looking at them does not provide any of the insights and experience gained by the mind that went through the exercise.
If one worries or fantasizes about the visual results or judgement about them, whether it is negative criticism, constructive criticism or even praise, one is full of preconception about 'how things should be' and not free to explore and really gain some good experience which will bring 'improvement' of results automatically over time. Worrying/fantasizing is not the mode I prefer my mind to be in as I art/live. The mode which focuses on the practice itself, the doing, making, being, here and now, not in the past, not in the future, not in any moment of any kind of possible response but right there with the thing and the process. That's the mode I prefer.
Ok, end of rant. Keep drawing.