Kalra 1

Ashmit Kalra

Ms. Bocchino

Writing 2

10 June 2024

Metacognitively Writing: Reflection on Class

Writing 2 as a class has served as both a challenging and significant learning experience

for me within my academic journey in college, advancing my knowledge in writing conventions

and helping me learn what’s valued in academic writing so I can succeed in my future classes.

Moreover, I’ve viewed this class as a huge opportunity to understand what I struggle in and take

the chance to fix that so I can maximize my writing skills and potential that can grant me

opportunities in the future with having the skill of being a good writer. From learning about

genres and their conventions in the first weeks of the quarter to writing two huge essays with

in-class workshops to significantly refining them and publishing them in our portfolio, I’m

appreciative of every step of the way that I get to learn how to improve as a writer. I value

learning more about my personal writing style and what I can get better at, especially from the

revision part of the portfolio assignment where I got to heavily revise and perfect my two writing

projects, as re-reading my essay over and over showed me the errors I made that I had originally

overlooked. I was able to better recognize the challenges I faced while initially writing and even

reflecting afterwards, trying to perfect something I already thought was perfect, and this

exemplified to me the theme of there always being room for improvement.

Throughout this class, I’ve seen my personal writing style evolve as my approach to

writing has become centered around focusing on a central theme. In earlier writing classes in

high school, I would simply see a thesis statement as an introduction to what my paper is about,
 Kalra 2

but I never really realized the deeper meanings you can convey when creating your own piece of

writing, where you can have pieces of your thesis present in every single sentence and paragraph.

Especially since I haven’t taken a class dedicated to writing in nearly a year, this class reminded

me how much I actually enjoy writing about topics that I’m passionate about and that speak to

me personally, which is the main reason I chose the topics I did for both of my writing projects.

Even in the previous essays I’ve written for other GE courses in previous quarters this year, all of

my claims that I’ve proposed and argued were ones I had some general interest in, from writing

about my family’s history and ethnicity in SOC 1 to online dating and relationships in COMM 1.

Choosing subjects that I’m interested in learning about motivates me to complete the assignment

and helps me speak from the heart, and overall makes the assignment more enjoyable. As a

writer, I make the conscious choice to incorporate some part of myself into my writing, whether

that’s generalizing personal experiences I’ve had or writing about topics that I actually care

about.

With the actual material in this class, I found value in learning about genre conventions

and the types of rhetoric that we should know about that are related to our writing processes,

such as tone and diction. Something that I noticed to be rather unique about this class is that in

previous literature classes I would learn about what specific wording techniques to use to convey

meaning, such as transition words and proper quote analysis, but this class showed me more of

how I could use them and their proper implications. Learning about rhetoric showed me how I

could alter the way I write based on different settings, helping me expand my creativity and

individuality as a writer. For example, if I’m writing an essay analyzing scholarly articles and the

difference in their disciplines, I’d make sure my tone and diction match the context of an

academic college paper, having argumentative wording and organization that shows a general
 Kalra 3

understanding of writing conventions. This was exactly how I went about writing WP1, as I

subconsciously kept in mind that I needed to sound professional and keep parts of the thesis

present in all parts of the essay to convey that I understand the prompt and also the actual

material of the scholarly articles. I incorporated an analytical tone as a key convention of a

college essay regarding academic articles, as scholar Jessie Szalay writes in her text “Making

Choices in Writing” about what tones to have among different contexts, such as that “[f]or

instance, your academic [writing] paper probably should not sound like you’re e-mailing a

friend.”1 Across all analytical essays I’ve written, I’ve made sure to match the tone with the

context and every rhetorical aspect with each other. Learning about these specific types of

rhetoric and how incorporated they are into writing as a whole is definitely something I’ll

remember from this class, as I’m now better equipped to read scholarly articles and write

academically about their contents, whatever the prompt entails.

Reflecting on my portfolio, I was able to make a plethora of changes to my WP1 & WP2

after re-reading my papers trying to find that central theme that I mentioned here previously.

Since I got a 100% on my WP1 submission draft, I was originally a little confused on what else I

needed to change besides the comments I received, but after reflecting on it I realized I had

reiterated some of my points way too often, which made it extend over a page above the limit for

the portfolio – neither of my writing projects needed to be 7 pages long. Looking at these papers

with a set of fresh eyes weeks after typing them allowed me to realize that I could’ve

incorporated my thesis more concisely across the entirety of both essays and made the themes of

the prompt more prominent, removing repetitive content to cut to the chase. This portfolio

assignment helped me reflect on what I could’ve done differently in these essays and gave me

1
Szalay, Jessie. “Making Choices in Writing.” Open English SLCC, August 1, 2016.
https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/making-choices-in-writing/.
 Kalra 4

the chance to be a reader and a writer. Mike Bunn writes about this concept in his essay “How To

Read Like a Writer,” where he says that “[r]eading like a writer can help you understand how the

process of writing is a series of making choices, and in doing so, can help you recognize

important decisions you might face and techniques you might want to use when working on your

own writing.”2 Here, Bunn tells us that we can take inspiration from our own writing and find out

what we want to change by pinpointing specific choices we make as writers. I found this

information significant in the work I did in revising WP2, as I realized that I needed to talk much

more about the separate genre conventions that guided my translation, which were scattered

throughout my initial submission draft. While revising, I put an emphasis on the non-academic

genre conventions of simpler diction and story-like tone, which I then incorporated to become a

central theme in my essay. This idea of constant polishing and revision from the portfolio has

been reinforced throughout this class, from the Project Builders to Reader Response Workshops

in class, and ultimately reflects what I’ve learned in this quarter.

Perhaps my biggest challenge I experienced in this class is the necessity of having proper

time management, and my most important takeaway from this class for me is the fact that I

re-learned how much I needed to work on it. I’m generally a slow writer so I knew that this class

would be the one I’d have to devote the most time to, but it definitely paid off because I was able

to learn more about my writing styles. I can definitely say I’ve improved on my writing speed

over the course of the quarter, but that may also be due to the fact that I naturally work better

under pressure, and the circumstances of having other classes to focus on with their own

conflicting deadlines meant that my academic priorities were somewhat all over the place. The

pace of this quarter quickly picked up as I’m taking 18 units in total this quarter, which is the

most I’ve ever done at one time within college, so being greeted with a boatload of work within a
2
Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing 2 (2011): 75.
 Kalra 5

short span of time was something that I had to quickly adjust to within my busiest quarter.

Moreover, the structure of this class being a 10-week quarter long class as compared to a

semester or even year of length made the learning process significantly faster than I had

expected. With this class in particular, the few weeks in between Writing Project 1 and 2 proved

to be a true test as I had to make sure my time management was top notch, ensuring that I

understood the material from class while translating that to my essays and submitting them on

time, usually minutes before the deadline if not on the dot. I wouldn’t say that I struggled with

any concepts in particular, and it’s more so that managing the class proved to be a challenge that

I overcame with time.

As I look back on this class, I’m greeted with experiences that remind me you can

constantly find ways to improve in anything you put your mind to, particularly with writing and

reflecting. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn how I can become a more skilled writer in

several different ways, from being taught how to differentiate genres by looking at conventions

to understanding rhetoric. Despite struggling with managing the time for these essays, I’ll always

appreciate how I tried my best with every assignment and continued this within my portfolio,

slimming down my Writing Projects to exactly 6 pages and upholding more of a sense of

concision. Concision is another feature I plan to apply to my future writing, as I’m more aware

that I should get straight to the point and organize other topics in an orderly fashion. All in all, I

consider myself to have improved significantly as a writer during this quarter, and I’m looking

forward to learning even more about my personal writing style and what I can change to do

better in the future.

References

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing 2 (2011):

71–86.

Szalay, Jessie. “Making Choices in Writing.” Open English SLCC, August 1, 2016.

https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/making-choices-in-writing/.