Harris1

Piper Harris
De Piero
Writing 2
14 March 2016
Metacognitive Reflection: The Final Words
I can still remember it like it was yesterday. I nervously stared at my computer screen, as
I hesitantly clicked down on the Add button. The words Writing 2 seemed like a death
sentence. My mind instantly flashed back to high school English classes, where I had to write
long, timed essays about the similes and parallelism in books like A Tale of Two Cities. I
shuddered. Fast-paced, strictly structured essays werent really my thing. I closed my laptop, and
hoped that a college-level writing class might be at least slightly less boring than my previous
ones. Eventually winter quarter rolled around, and my career in Writing 2 began. I tried to go
into the class with an open mind, but I was still doubtful that it would be interesting.
The second day of class is where my mindset about writing completely changed. In the
beginning of the class, we were asked to write in our journals about some genres we were
familiar with in high school. I listed some basic genres of books, such as romance and epics.
I didnt really see the point of the activity. Later on in the class, De Piero started talking about
how horror movies were their own genre I was a little bit confused. The only genres I had
known about were in books. Then, we started watching some clips of The Shining and
Psycho, which I of course loved. As we watched each clip, we would go over typical features
of a horror movie, such as screaming and blood, and we would see if each movie clip had
them. After that, we started analyzing the similarities and differences between emails requesting
a letter of recommendation. At this point, I just needed to take a breather I had never

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considered such things as being their own genres. By the end of the class, though, things were
starting to make a lot more sense to me. Zack asked us to jot down some genres we could write
about in our PB1A; I listed food commercials, break up text, love letter, works cited page,
billboard.
From that point on, I understood that Writing 2 wasnt going to be like every other
English class I had in high school. Not only did our teacher wear Birkenstocks and listen to
Tycho (two of my favorites), but he helped me realize that writing is everywhere (Zack,
sometime from the first week of class). I ditched my old conception of an English class and
welcomed Writing 2 with open arms. I was ready to learn. When WP1 came around, I felt that I
had a pretty good understanding of genres. In my paper, I compared and contrasted the
conventions of pasta recipes between my three sources, and explained the value of understanding
genres. I integrated a lot of class readings, and used good transitions. I ended up a decent grade,
but I still had a long way to come in my writing career WP2 was approaching.
WP2 presented a much greater challenge for me. I didnt mind writing about delicious
pasta recipes, but academic articles just seemed a little, well, boring. A lot of the wording
confused me, and as I was writing about the sources in my paper, I felt like I didnt even
understand them that well myself. When I got my paper back, my grade showed me that I didnt
understand them too well. Zacks comments read things like Tell me more about these pieces
what specific data did they collect? and What, exactly, was measured? How was it measured?
What did they find? To fix WP2, I had to go back and re-read all the articles, and make sure to
include details about the things I discussed, like saying The experimenters collected data such
as a sentiment score, which is a rating the experimenters give a tweet depending on if it is

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positive or negative. Details like these allow the reader to actually understand what Im writing
about, and it makes my argument make more sense.
Between both WP1 and WP2, I realized that one of my biggest problems were my thesis
statements, which had super unspecific phrases like various forms of rhetorical appeals and
the three sources manipulate things. When I turned both of the papers in, I knew that the thesis
statements needed a lot of work, but I just couldnt quite figure out what to fix. The activity that
finally gave me inspiration for my thesis statements was the Google DocAThon. As I read
through my peers problems and questions for the class, I found that many people had the exact
same issue as me they wrote vague theses. When I responded to people having this problem
with things like You might want to include specific examples of features/conventions that were
similar or different between the articles, I realized that I needed to follow my own advice, and
make my theses more specific. When it came time to rewrite my WPs, I applied all I had written
to my peers to my own paper, and created awesome, detailed theses (I hope)!
After surviving through WP1 and WP2, I geared up to face my next target WP3. This
was by far the most daunting. I remember looking at the prompt and thinking Okay, how on
Earth am I going to transform an article about writing into two different genres? The task
seemed impossible. When I wrote up my plan for this writing project in PB3A, I thought the
transformations I chose would maybe turn out alright, but Zacks comment on it showed me that
I needed to think way harder about my transformations. After that, I sought help from the man
himself, and wrote him asking if he could help me chose which transformations to use for my
writing project. I kept telling Zack about new ideas I thought of, but each one got shut down. I
knew they were crappy, but I just couldnt think of anything better. At this point, I was sure Id
fail this writing project.

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I read over Zacks emails again, and one comment really stuck with me: Go back to the
Disney artists and how they captured that tree in different ways. How can you capture Huckins
piece in different ways? Seeing it a second time truly gave me a better understanding of how it
applies to WP3. After watching the Disney artists, I saw that they were all painting the same tree,
but each painting looked vastly different. The artists dont just summarize the tree, but they
completely changed the way it was presented, while still retaining the trees original essence. In
thlog 8 I wrote that it It is exactly the same thing that I will be doing for my WP3.
After hours and hours of typing until my fingers were sore, I completed my pride and joy
in Writing 2. I turned my literary article into a childrens story it was awesome. WP3 was
easily the hardest project I had to do this quarter, but it also really forced me to get creative and
work hard. All of the stress from this project was completely worth it when I got a 10/10 on it. I
swear I was about to cry tears of joy. After getting not-so-good grades on the last two writing
projects, getting an A on this one felt like all my hard work had finally paid off. What was even
better was that Zack even asked me to present my transformation to the class. I felt like a proud
mom.
One of the biggest things I learned from WP3 is that my writing needs a purpose. As I
wrote in my ninth thlog, I had to take into account why a certain audience needs to learn about
the article. When I was coming up with bad ideas for WP3, a recurring problem with them was
that there wasnt a good reason for the transformations. One of my ideas was transforming the
article into a blog post but who is it from? Why is it important? Why do people need to read it?
When I decided on turning my article into a childrens story, I took a lot of time thinking about
why children would need to learn about something as complex as textual silences. But then I
realized that the point didnt have to be about textual silences explicitly it could be about

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something the kids would actually understand. The whole point of the transformation was to
make the piece relevant to them.
After reviewing all of my WPs for my portfolio, I realized that they all had a pretty
central focus on how audience effects the rhetorical features used. Im not sure if thats just my
interpretation of the pieces, but every time I compared sources, like the three pasta recipes, I
always considered the audience to have the biggest influence on how they are presented. As Losh
and Alexander said, everything you write is influenced by what you know about the audiences
expectations (7). That being said, one of the main things I learned from this course is that the
audience can influence countless decisions the author makes. In my WP1, I saw that the main
differences between the recipes, like the directions or language used, were because of the kind of
audience! In WP2, I looked at how the audience has a huge influence on the type of moves
used. In WP3s transformation to a childrens story, I had to use simple language and other
similar moves, all to appeal to the young age group. I feel like the audience should be considered
such an important influence on something, because everything is being presented in order to get
the audience to react a certain way.
All in all, I feel like I really did take a lot of valuable information away from this class.
WP3 really allowed me to see my development as a writer, and I completely understood how it
built upon the other two writing projects. Not only that, but getting the chance to revisit my first
two WPs allowed me to see some bad choices I made on them, and then apply the new things
Ive learned to fix them. When I was reading things like my old theses from WP1 and WP2, I
was surprised that I had left them like that. I was so grateful to be able to fix them up, because I
have learned a LOT since the beginning of this quarter, like to be more specific and write with a
purpose. I feel like I still need to improve on some things, like making sure every sentence

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strengthens my main point, but Ive still come a really long way with writing from this class.
This class rocked, and I loved the way it was taught. Thank you, Zack.

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Works Cited
My Thlogs
My Journals
Some stuff Zack in class