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Metacognitive Reflection

Raymond Vargas

Writing 2: Allison Bocchino

June 8, 2024

My experience with writing this quarter was an interesting ride from start to finish. I went

into this course excited to learn more about academic writing after finishing the other writing

class offered at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Writing 1. After being slightly

disappointed with the quality of the previous class, I thought Writing 2 was going to offer a lot

more insight and techniques as to how to improve my writing. The main evolution in my

thinking, reading, and writing throughout the course of this class has been my constantly

improving ability to skim through text articles. Skimming through articles was something that

had been introduced to me the previous quarter, but I was finally able to apply and perfect the

usage throughout this class. Having to scour through dozens of articles for our writing projects

was tedious work, but it was made less tedious when I started to skim through the articles. My

approach to writing hasn’t changed as much as I would have liked it to. I still find writing to be

an unpleasant experience, however that does not have much to do with writing itself, but more so

my specific writing process. I tend to procrastinate a lot throughout my writing process. It has

gotten to the point where I dread having to write because I know that I will put off the

assignment until the very end. With that being said however, I did learn a lot from the teachings

of this course.

My main takeaways from this course are the study of genres and discourse communities.

I have always sort of known what the definition of a genre was, but this course really solidified it

to me. We learned that genre is, ”A typified utterance that appears in a recurrent situation. A
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genre evolves through human use and activity to be a durable and usable form for carrying out

human communicative intentions in fairly stable ways.”1 With this definition we can deduce that

a genre must have three things in order to be considered a genre. The three things something

needs to be considered a genre are for it to be typified, an utterance, and for it to be recurrent.

This is important to me because now I can identify whether something is a genre or not. The

second takeaway I gained from this course was the understanding of discourse communities. I

was not very familiar with the term discourse community before this class. However, I soon

learned that a discourse community is a term that can be used to describe a group of people that

share a common goal, use similar methods of communication, and use the same genres.2 This

made me realize that there are discourse communities everywhere and that I was a part of several

of them. Because of this writing course, I feel more knowledgeable in subject areas that have

been around me my whole life.

After taking this class, I feel as if my writing style has not yet been fully cemented yet.

This class specifically has a lot of meta analysis and that is not something that I find myself

writing about often. I actually really despised writing about genre conventions, I found it to not

be a very good use of time. If I had to define my own personal writing style, I would say that my

tone is semi-formal and not very concise. Once again, I do not think this course is particularly

helpful when it comes to defining someone's writing style, but something that has stayed

prominent throughout my writing projects this quarter has been the unclear sentence structure

that does not explain much. I found myself revising sentences that were slightly too long that

lacked any real substance. I would not consider myself a creative person, nor a good writer so

1
Bickmore, Lisa. "Genre in the Wild." In Open English @ SLCC. Accessed May 17, 2024.
https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-rhetorical
-ecosystems/.
2
Driscoll, D., & Vetter, M. (2020). Understanding Discourse Communities by Dan Melzer. In Writing
Spaces. Parlor Press, LLC.
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these are not conscious choices in my style of writing. I hope that my writing style improves over

the course of my academic career because I don’t think that my current writing style will suffice

in a professional setting.

The revision of my portfolio was not very extensive and was mostly about fixing the

minor mistakes that were made when originally doing the writing projects. In Writing Project 1,

the main change I made was to my thesis statement. Our instructor, Allison Bocchino, let me

know that my original thesis statement was too specific. My original thesis statement only

mentioned evidence as the only things that I was going to compare, but in my essay I go into

details about many other comparisons. That change greatly impacted my introduction, because

now my thesis statement actually lets the readers know what to expect with the following essay.

Another change I made was the addition of footnotes. Before this class, I had never used Chicago

style citations. When I originally wrote the essay for Writing Project 1, I did not know we had to

use footnotes. It turns out that I just plainly ignored the instructions in the prompt. Once I learned

how to use footnotes I quickly was able to make the change to my essay. The last big change that

was made to my essay for Writing Project 1 was the addition of evidence to one of my claims.

Our instructor had let me know that I should elaborate on a claim that I made in my essay. I

promptly followed her suggestion and named all of the headings and used proper citations in

doing so. My Writing Project 2 essay was slightly less difficult to correct than the first one. My

essay was riddled with minor errors that should have been proofread and dealt with before my

final submission. There was an abundance of run-on sentences that I fixed. I did not realize how

many there were until I read the notes that my instructor had left. These changes generally just

improved the clarity of my Writing Project 2 essay. The only large addition to my essay was the
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expanding of genre conventions of my particular choice. I didn’t go into as much detail as I

originally should have, so expanding my ideas was done rather quickly.

While I did base most of my changes on what my instructor recommended, there were

some changes that I chose to ignore. In my essay for Writing Project 1, my instructor claimed

that it felt as if I had two opening hooks in my introduction. This was a creative decision made

by myself to show just how different the two disciplines are. If I removed one hook the

introduction would not be as balanced as it is currently. Another comment I chose to ignore was

in regards to me proving that a podcast was a genre. I can argue that it is really important to

make that clarification because my translation was not a typical written one. Without my

clarification, my entire translation would have been null.

Overall, this Writing 2 course has helped me come to the conclusion that I am not a fan of

meta writing. Meta analysis is something that I believe I still need to work on, or just ignore in

the future. That is not to say that I found this class to be wasteful, I did still learn plenty of useful

tips and terms that have helped me define what my writing style will be. I look forward to my

future writing endeavors.

Bibliography

Bickmore, Lisa. "Genre in the Wild." In Open English @ SLCC. Accessed May 17, 2024.
https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-r
hetorical-ecosystems/.

Driscoll, D., & Vetter, M. (2020). Understanding Discourse Communities by Dan Melzer. In
Writing Spaces. Parlor Press, LLC.