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Metacognitive Reflection

From genres to logical fallacies, to discourse communities, to murder (rhetorically

speaking, of course), my approaches to thinking, reading, and writing have drastically evolved

throughout this course. I have learned many new terms in Writing 2, and of equal importance,

I’ve learned many particular techniques and tips to maximize the thinking, reading, and writing

processes. Being exposed to these productive and effective strategies, I feel that my writing itself

does not just show improvement, but the personal, behind-the-scenes planning for my work has

significantly progressed.

Prior to learning about the individual emphasis on the reading process in Mike Bunn’s

“How to Read Like a Writer,” I used to have this idea that reading for classes or any form of

assigned reading felt stimulatingly restrictive--apart from reading books, articles, and magazines

for the sole desire of learning and feeling new things. I felt I only read for retentional purposes,

to simply recite the information in an assigned book or article for a midterm. However, after

reading Bunn’s article, a statement of his particularly stood out to me: “when you Read Like a

Writer (RLW) … you are reading to learn about writing.”​1​ I was previously so focused on

reading to learn about content that when I became more aware of this alternative mental activity

that occurs when digesting a text, I felt much more observant and alert as I searched for certain

notions within the author's motives and asked questions about their writing choices. Reading like

a writer means to not only be thinking about those questions but to be looking for those answers

prior to and during your reading of the text. It also means you are looking at the writing through

the author's lens while looking through yours to see the effects of their choices. I had not viewed

1. Mike Bunn, “How to Read Like a Writer,” ​Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume ​2 | Writing Spaces,
https://writingspaces.org/volume2.
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the writings of others in this way before, allotting more focus towards my own personal choices

when writing, and this gave me a completely new outlook on how to read works of writing.

I was somewhat familiar with the concepts of rhetoric that we had discussed in class, but

it was interesting to learn about it through Janet Boyd’s lens in “Murder! (Rhetorically

Speaking)” with her murder scenario approach to writing and prompting students to ask

themselves questions such as “What types of details did you find yourself adding? Why? What

details did you omit? Why? What kind of words did you choose?”​2​ I found this to be a unique

perspective on beginning to learn about rhetoric, and it made me more actively aware of what it

is that enables me to write for a specific circumstance appropriately and how the expectations of

my audience play a role into it.​ I was able to apply this newfound knowledge by following the

procedure of isolating facts I obtained from the scientific journal used for my WP2 in a similar

“who, what, where, when, how” format. Using Boyd’s technique of ​being given a number of

facts to write about and determining the fashion in which you wish to tell the story, it helped me

to ​decide which aspects of the information fit the conventions of my translated non-academic

genre the most as well as enabled me to focus on including the necessary information with a new

tone and in different order of information to make it appear as close to the conventions of the

translated non-academic genre.

While the above concepts were just some of my favorite strategies and tricks, I

surprisingly was rattled by the introduction to Lisa Bickmore’s definition of the term “genre” in

“Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical (Eco)systems.” Before starting this

course, my conceptions of how genre was defined were more along the lines of categories or

kinds of art and literature. Truthfully speaking, the only examples of genres that I would have

2. Janet Boyd, “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking),” ​Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume ​2 | Writing
Spaces, https://writingspaces.org/volume2.
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most likely been able to initially think of were music, book, and movie genres. I did not realize

that for something to constitute a genre in writing, it just has to be typified, a written utterance,

and recurrent.​3​ I felt that I have been considering genres as a more narrow category of work, and

without this course, I most likely would have not known that genre could be used broadly in

writing contexts and is not necessarily confined to being categorical. I still struggled to

understand this different definition throughout the course, but it did open my eyes to how many

more things are actually genres, even a multitude of things around our own houses. On top of

this, being introduced to this definition made me realize how flexible the term is and how it is

able to have a different meaning for different contexts.

Having taken this class, I now define my personal writing style as much more conscious

of how it is portrayed to the audience, and how I can revise my written thoughts in a way that

displays it as effectively as I aim to depict. I mostly accredit this to the revisions of my WP1 and

WP2, as shown in my Revision Matrix. Through many of these revisions, I found that I tend to

exaggerate thoughts and excessively linger on certain points at times. While I may view this as

thorough, I have come to realize that my audience would most likely prefer to also be able to

appreciate the concision in some of the points I am trying to make. For instance, in my WP1 I

wrote, “Many people are familiar with this structure of writing, however, it requires a more

immersive reading to fully follow the development of the author’s analysis. There are no

headings for a skimmer to browse for or tables that sum up findings.” While all true points, I was

redundant with previous statements I made in the paper because I felt that I needed to always be

thorough. And so, I revised the sentence to simply be, “This requires a more immersive reading

3. Lisa Bickmore, “GENRE in the WILD: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems,” Open English @
SLCC, August 1, 2016,
https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-rhetorical-ecosyste
ms/.
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to fully follow the development of the author’s analysis”--addressing the same points without

excessive wording and repetitive analysis. Apart from concision, I also noticed through revising

my WP2 specifically, that while I aim to address all aspects of a prompt, that objective tends to

disorganize my thoughts rather than distribute everything in an organized manner. I noticed I

would construct some of my writing in corresponding sequential responses to the questions

asked of me. I focused on this the most when revising my WP2, and I feel that the distribution of

my analysis and integrated quotes are apparent of that in the revision. While I feel I strongly

attended to the organization of the content in my revised WP2, the majority of the edits in my

WP1 revolved around the language and style. I struggled with staying on topic with every point

of analysis I made, connecting it back to what it tells us about the discipline's discourse

communities and their genre conventions. I revised sentences to center around this idea with

more emphasis, as well as divide areas into new paragraphs in hopes to clarify and address this

concern. I still maintain my own voice in my writing which I feel is individual to my style,

however, I feel that receiving feedback like the above and guidance on what I should respond to

the most has made me more active in balancing thoroughness and concision as well as

maintaining organization and style throughout my writing. I find that my thoroughness and

ability to explain in-depth is one of my strongest features when I am able to simultaneously

achieve this balance of concision alongside it.

I undoubtedly will be able to apply what I have learned in Writing 2 to future writing

assignments that I will encounter. I will be able to tackle the thinking and reading process with

much more efficiency and awareness of my motives as both a writer and reader. I also believe

that I am more equipped for researching contexts, as I feel more confident in my ability to derive
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useful information from chosen scholarly journals and dissecting them to be of use in a paper.

Even the mere ability to find and choose an appropriate scholarly journal has become a more

comfortable process as I had trouble in the beginning when picking out a journal that

corresponded to my chosen academic discipline for WP1.

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Bibliography

Bickmore, Lisa. “GENRE in the WILD: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.”

Open English @ SLCC, August 1, 2016.

https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-

within​rhetorical-ecosystems/.

Boyd, Janet. “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking).” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume

2 | Writing Spaces. Accessed May 13, 2020. ​https://writingspaces.org/volume2​.

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume

2 | Writing Spaces. Accessed June 6, 2020. ​https://writingspaces.org/volume2​.