Metacognitive Reflection: Slowing Things Down and Spreading Things Out

Dylan Chung

WRIT 2 - Academic Writing

December 11th, 2020

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Metacognitive Reflection: Slowing Things Down and Spreading Things Out

Writing always seemed to be an amorphous and innate talent based skill to me. I was

always excited to start my next assignment with a fresh and creative outlook but would always

end up coming short. I would rush into the brainstorming section of my writing process and

come up with ideas that I thought were fantastic and revolutionary. I would outline the

paragraphs and my ideas and try to formulate a structure that made a lot of sense, one that you

could look at and just go, “This paper feels like a lot of effort was put into it.” And while I

always did put in a lot of effort, I would never quite get the result that I wanted. Paragraph and

idea organization always felt off and my revolutionary idea always seemed just a little too

confusing. Even though I knew I had all of these problems, I never quite knew what to fix about

my writing. But as I took WRIT 2 this quarter, a lot of things about my writing process have

changed that allow me to tackle these problems a bit better. Throughout this quarter, my writing

process has become more set in stone, allowing me to better envision the topics I want to write

about beforehand, more easily identify organizational problems after drafting, and enjoy the

writing process much more, which in turn allows me to more effectively dedicate time and effort

to my writing.

The biggest change to my writing and writing process that brought about improvement

was the spreading out of my writing process across more time. This spreading out of my writing

process allowed me to cut less corners and realize the simple problems that I was overlooking in

my organization, idea delivery, and main argument. Firstly, spending more time, up until a point,

to write something just increases the quality of a piece of writing. It makes sense that something

that was written across two weeks and 20 overall hours is going to be better than something that

was written across two days with 10 overall hours. When I had more time to write and
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brainstorm, I cut much fewer corners. Two specific things I spent time on that gave me a better

final product were a more defined main argument and a better rough draft analysis. When I

started out this quarter, I began my rough drafts with just a vague idea of my main argument.

This would lead to a confusing paper that seemed to change arguments somewhat throughout the

length of the paper. This was in part due to my rushed brainstorming and outlining process. I

would begin my paper thinking one thing but finish the conclusion thinking an entirely different

thing. To avoid this problem, I formulated a more concrete idea of what I was trying to say right

from the very beginning. Thanks to this change, I would always refer the topic sentences,

transitions, and conclusions of each body paragraph back to the main idea. Reading this now, it

seems kind of silly that I never did this in the first place but I believe I still have a ways to go

with fully and properly integrating this into my writing process. Another change that I realized

was very important was a more robust rough draft analysis. This more robust analysis included a

better deconstruction process that would reveal to me a reverse outline given my body

paragraphs. By deconstructing the paragraphs in this way, organizational mistakes become much

more obvious. Not to mention, unnecessary information sticks out like a sore thumb. Sometimes

I even catch when I miss out on a whole aspect of the prompt. Essentially, throughout this

quarter, I was given the time to figure out my writing process more so than find new practices to

add to it. But in doing so, I was able to improve my final products a substantial amount by

covering the basics and beginning to approach more complex ideas.

Based on these mentioned changes to my writing process, I was able to make revisions to

my WP1 and WP2 accordingly and improve my organization, idea delivery, content, and

citations. Thanks to the spread out writing process mentioned in the previous paragraph, aspects

such as organization and idea delivery were much easier to tackle. For my first WP1, the
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organization and idea delivery were not the worst but they still had areas to improve on. The

ordering of my ideas made comparing the two academic articles somewhat annoying. This was

because I combed through the articles one at a time. However, in my revisions, I made sure to

have a little bit of back and forth to more explicitly show how the two differ from each other in

their data presentation, intended audience, and qualitative vs quantitative mannerisms. In

addition to this, I made sure that it was more explicit what each paragraph was going to be about.

In my original submission, I was very vague about what my paragraphs were going to be about.

If the paragraph was generally about evidence, I usually did not go much deeper than evidence or

diagrams in the topic sentences. In the revised submission, I made sure to pinpoint what was

being discussed, such as the presentation of evidence or the amount of evidence, and how it

affected the readers, such as whether it made the readers confused or more reassured. Moving on

to my first WP2, there were a lot of things that needed to be fixed. The most prominent thing that

was fixed was my reflection and translation content. My reflection was very off focus, talking

about adventure fantasy webtoons while I was writing an adventure fantasy short story. To

counter this, I made sure to revise my genre translation to be about online cooking recipes and

stick to this genre in the reflection. I also lacked a description of how the translation was

connected to the original genre. It was pretty obvious that the translation was an adventure

fantasy, but it was very unclear where the academic article played into the translation. For my

revised WP2 reflection, I was much more explicit about the connection. I realized that, in the

original submission, I was unaware of this missing information due to the fact that I was rushing

to finish my WP2 reflection. Both of my WPs were littered with citation mistakes, something

that I hope to have overcome by now in my portfolio. For my WP1, I used MLA in-text citation

rather than footnotes. For my WP2, I used footnotes but incorrectly. Though I probably should
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have done this before WP1, this time around I made sure to more carefully read up on how to

properly create citations with footnotes. The result ended up being proper footnotes with proper

numbering for each unique citation. At the very least, I believe that both of my WPs were

improved on. WP1 had fewer changes that focused on organization, idea delivery, and citations,

while WP2 had major renovations that revised basically all of the content and idea delivery as

well as citations.

Another one of the biggest factors that facilitated my improvement across WP revisions

was the style and amount of feedback given to me, both from myself and other people, which

allowed me to properly pinpoint and deal with certain mistakes made in the original submissions.

Whenever I made comments to myself they were always sloppy, informal, and not very well-

defined. Basically, my comments were inconsequential; either I was too nice to myself because

that meant I did not have to change anything, or I was too overbearing to the point that it felt like

I had to rewrite everything, which also led to me not changing much. The two things that helped

to change my feedback process were the reading “Responding—Really Responding—to Other

Students’ Writing” by Straub1 and Ms. Bocchino’s comments on my paper. “Really Responding”

helped me to tackle my problems with what to comment and how long to make my comments.

Straub explains that my comments should be written “out in full statements.”2 The commenter,

me in this case, should be able to “say what you have to say and then go back over the statement

and explain what you mean or why you said it or note other alternatives.”3

Although this reading was meant to teach other readers about how to respond to other

classmates’ papers, this reading ended up helping me respond to my own papers in a more

meaningful way and improve my revision process. Instead of being lax with myself because I

was writing my own comments, I made sure to be just as attentive, if not more, when writing my
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own comments as I was with other peoples’ comments. On the other hand, Ms. Bocchino helped

my writing out in a more hands-on way. Now I know that there were flaws in my writing

process, specifically in brainstorming, that I never used to realize were there. Ms. Bocchino’s

comments helped me to realize that there was a pattern in the things that I was missing out on. In

past classes, my feedback always felt very airy; even though it seemed like there was feedback,

there really was not too much actionable information. The feedback would always be really

conceptual and complex, making it hard for me to respond to. Ms. Bocchino’s comments were

different in the way that they were very specific, such as when I had improvements I could make

to the organization or when I was missing a connection between my genre translation and my

reflection. Based on comments that pointed out things such as these, I realized that these were

things that I should never really skip out on if I meant to write a good paper. As a result, I

realized that there were fundamental problems in my brainstorming process that meant that even

the obvious stuff went straight over my head. Being able to have access to readings that I could

refer to again and again, such as a reading about feedback and well-defined comments, allowed

me to realize the major faults in my brainstorming and revision process and improve upon them.

Though I have quite a few things I think I did well on in WRIT 2, one concept I struggled

with was genres, largely due to my many misconceptions about how and by who genre was

defined. When we first started reading about genres in class, I originally had problems due to the

fact that I had not read many different genres of literature. The extent of my genre knowledge

was limited to a very limited few in film so I had a hard time understanding what exactly drew

the line between different genres. Thankfully, Janet Boyd’s “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)”4

helped me to begin to understand genres a bit better. More so than just the definition of a genre
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provided, the activity helped me to understand. Jumping from being a detective to a coroner to

someone writing a eulogy and then a lawyer helped me to innately understand the importance of

tone and audience shifts. I originally believed that the audience’s expectations were the only

things that really mattered, but when Boyd asks “What tone did you take?”5 and “What types of

details did you find yourself adding? Why? What details did you omit? Why?”6 I realized that

genre has even more to do with the writer’s desires than just the audience’s expectations.

However, just because I knew this did not mean that I was able to deliver as well as I had hoped

to. Genre relies not only on the details added but also the medium that the details are sent

through. Though I made quite a bit of progress in the genre aspect, I still ended up having a hard

time understanding exactly what differentiated a genre from another really similar genre.

Overall, I believe that I was able to greatly improve on my own writing style. Before this

class, I always tried my best to imitate the in-class readings as well as I could. I still do that now

but as I spend more time writing, I have begun to realize that my writing has a very

conversational feel to it. This allows my writing to feel more relaxed and natural, something that

has always been my goal ever since I started high school. As I continue to write from here on

out, I hope to be able to forge my own writing style in various different contexts, academic as

well as non-academic, to be able to become a more well-rounded and interesting writer. In the

end, throughout the course of this quarter, I learned a lot about my writing process and how to

improve upon it. As a result, I have come to enjoy writing much more, something that I know

will stick with me far beyond the end of this class.

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Bibliography

Straub, Richard. “Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’ Writing.” In The

Subject is Writing 2nd ed., edited by Wendy Bishop, 136-146. Boynton/Cook Publishers,
1999.

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

Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 87-101. Parlor Press,
2011.