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Dear Professor (A Metacognitive Reflection)

Dear Professor Bocchino,

To say the least, this class has been an up and down battle for me. My journey with

writing has never been easy, it has always been filled with mental breakdowns and long nights.

Throughout high school, I would often work tirelessly on essays, but I would still not receive the

grade that I wanted. I even struggled with the writing portion of the SAT. In order to improve my

writing, I would often stay after class and set up meetings with my teachers. So entering college

with this history, especially when it is online, has been quite rough. However, through my ups

and downs, I have learned quite a lot. For starters, my approach to thinking or planning an essay

has changed. Previously, I would sit there and think of a thesis followed by a 3 topic sentence

and then find evidence for it. I learned that collecting evidence on everything pertaining to the

topic, like all the writing conventions in PB2, allowed me to pull my main ideas easier.

Additionally, I have learned how to read an academic article. When initially receiving the

assignment, I was intimidated by two extremely long and dense articles. But through “Reading

Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” by Roseberg, I learned how to use each

section step by step to understand the content in my article. I also learned how to put everything

together. Instead of reading from beginning to end, Roseberg advises us to “read [the article]

unevenly and out of order to look for the holy grail of the main argument.” Finally, through the

way that the assignments were assigned, I learned that in my writing I can always revise more.

Throughout this class, I revised my writing 3 separate times, with the final portfolio being a

major revision. Additionally, I was surprised to find that the entire focus of this class was on the

study of genres. At first, I had not realized that a CD or a meme could be considered a genre.

Now, I have learned about the unique conventions that can make up each genre. For example, I

learned about “discourse communities” and the different components that make up a discourse
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community, like “a broadly agreed-upon set of common public goals, mechanisms of

intercommunication among members, use of these communication mechanisms to provide

information and feedback, one or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse

community, a specific lexis, and a threshold level of expert members.” These components

became prevalent when I was reading my academic articles. For example, I saw that there was a

more difficult threshold level of expert members for the health sciences than for the

anthropology discourse community, which would also affect the jargon that is used. Throughout

this class, I learned the most from the discussions and lecture videos. For me, someone

explaining information always helps me learn better than acquiring knowledge from articles like

Writing Spaces. The discussions helped me understand these topics and what I needed to work

on. This worked well for me because I was able to ask questions and hear other people’s

opinions to get a deeper understanding of a subject.

After taking this class, I would define my personal writing style as “conversationalist”.

For me this means, I’m writing the way I talk. This comes with some cons like grammar

mistakes, punctuation mistakes, and lack of organization. This is also not the best choice when

writing certain papers. As a result, some conscious choices that I have made in my writing to

express my individuality as a writer are: writing everything down initially without making any

edits, creative titles and introductions that could engage the reader in conversation, and adding a

conclusion at the end of my papers. However, after receiving feedback from classmates, I

decided to stray away from this style in Writing Project 2, so that the reader could understand the

choices I was making. I will allude to this later. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that my writing is

extremely unique, but I am proud to say that you can “hear” a little of my voice with each paper

you read.
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In WP1, I received feedback that I had not discussed the differences between the

disciplines. I found that all the differences in conventions were the result of the two disciplines

having different audiences. From this, I redirected my thesis and topic sentences to focus on the

idea of the effect that the audience has on the conventions in each article. I felt like the evidence

that I had pulled was strong in terms of the new thesis, so I found that I didn’t have to change

them at all.  However, because of this redirection, I had to add additional commentary and

rephrase a lot of my body paragraphs. More specifically, these changes were made to the

commentary at the ends of body paragraphs 1, 2, and 3. In body paragraph 1, I was also able to

add a reference to a reading from class. In class, we also discussed the importance of the

introduction and conclusion. After reading my introduction with a pair of fresh eyes, I discovered

that my hook was focused on racial inequalities rather than socioeconomic status. This topic was

not discussed in my paper, so it could confuse the reader later on. As a replacement, I decided to

hook the reader with a discussion on the Covid-19 pandemic because it is prevalent to current

readers. The reason I made this choice was that the purpose of the introduction is to hook the

reader into wanting to continue reading. Additionally, I felt like the conclusion of my paper was

another weak point. The conclusion is important because it serves as a take-home message and it

is important to leave the reader thinking. Since I originally introduced the idea about the

audience here, my original conclusion was messy and all over the place. As a result, I simplified

my original paragraph and added a take-home message from each of the articles. Finally, in both

WP1 and WP2, I had repetitive punctuation and footnote mistakes, so I took the time to make

sure all of them were fixed in each project.

In WP2, I decided to put most of my focus on the beginning of the paper because I felt

like my paper had not fit the original rubric. The original rubric indicated that the reflection is
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intended to be an academic article. To fix this, I had to combine the first part of my body

paragraphs with the introduction and rewrite almost the entire first body paragraph. This process

took the longest and you can see that because the differences are quite prevalent. This also

included an addition of a discussion of the conventions of an academic article. Additionally, as I

discussed before, I decided to downplay my personal writing style. I did this as a result of the

feedback I had received from my peers. They felt like they couldn’t understand a lot of my ideas

and since it was meant to be an academic article, it had to be more informative. Therefore, you

will notice a difference in the structures and wording of my sentences. In both the feedback I

received from my peers and you, I was alerted that I had not provided examples for my

conventions or for the scripts I looked at. As a result, I added examples of how I evoked pathos

into my paper and an example from and discussion on a script that I had based my translation on.

I also realized that my original draft was missing a discussion on the conventions that I ignored

for a documentary script. This is important because I don’t want my reader to think that my

script is perfect when it is not. I discussed the absence of time stamps and the reason that I

decided not to include them. It is also important to note that I combined BP3 and BP4 because

they were both discussing similar topics. I felt like that was important because I didn’t want to

cut off my ideas in the middle. Therefore, I found a way to incorporate BP4 into BP3. Finally, I

also made some changes to my original script. To start, I decided to include the interview clips of

Bernie Sanders and the members of the underserved community first. I did this because I felt like

it would be powerful to start with the action, instead of slowly presenting it. I switched the scene

with the facts and sad music to later so that I would “calm down the audience” before the

narration started. A major change that I also made to my script was the addition of an extra

column for my captions. I felt like this was important because, in my original script, the visual
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column was overflowing. After all, it had text and images at the same time. I felt like this change

would allow me to add more text to my script, which could be used to emphasize the important

parts of the narration. There were various changes made to both of my writing projects, so in this

reflection, I only discussed the most major and important changes.

I have learned a lot throughout this revision process and I hope my work in my portfolio

reflects that. I believe that it reflects everything that I have learned this quarter, including writing

conventions, discourse communities, and how to read an academic article. Throughout this entire

class, I have grown as a writer, I have found ways to organize my thoughts and to make my

writing more informative. I believe the strongest feature I have acquired is my persistence and

this is prevalent at the beginning of Writing Project 2. I worked hard on the organization and

structure of my sentences so that it would be more informative and be structured like an

academic paper. In the future, I will apply my knowledge of writing conventions to different

forms of writing, since I’m a STEM student, like research papers. I will also take my acquired

knowledge on how to read academic papers to help me better understand the various papers I

will have to read in the future. The concepts that I struggled the most in were reading and writing

academic papers. However, in the future, I feel like I will be able to write similar papers more

efficiently and successfully. I definitely have a lot to work on like my grammar, organization,

and informative writing, but I am extremely thankful for all of your help and hard work this

quarter!

Gratefully, 
Anthea Meng