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Tanya Ngo

Writing 2

Maddie Roepe

December 2, 2023

Metacognitive Essay: My Journey Through Writing 2

Throughout high school I always took the opportunity to take advanced English classes. I

was confident enough in my ability to write essays and comprehend English so I challenged

myself to these courses. I ended up doing extremely well in the classes themselves but in the

actual AP exams I scored a 3 for both the English Literature and Language Composition tests. It

meant my essays and comprehension skills were decent, but not at college level yet. This meant

that I would have to take Writing 2 at UCSB. I knew I had nothing to be embarrassed about, not

everyone is good at English, but I still felt a sense of shame that I was not able to get that

requirement done before my first quarter as a freshman.

Before starting Writing 2, I expected it to be just like any other English class: you read

texts and are asked to analyze the information before you’re quizzed on it. But after starting, I

knew that this class would be completely different from any other high school English classes

that I’ve taken. All of the topics covered within this course such as genres, scholarly

conversations, and the revision process were so much more complex than anything else I’ve

learned before. Grammar, syntax, and punctuations were no longer the main focus of class.

Writing 2 taught me how to read other people’s writings and apply that to my own writing

process.

My first project in the class was a genre translation project. I was tasked to find a

peer-reviewed article and turn the information in the article into a different genre. This project
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was rather broad and we were given free reign to decide what genre we wanted to use. We could

do a poem, short story, or even a ransom letter; but I chose to translate the information into a

breaking news article. Writing in a completely new genre was exciting. I had never written a

breaking news story before and I wanted to give it a try. Since my scholarly article was about

how women tend to consume more true crime content rather than men, I thought this was the

perfect genre to translate into. A reading in class that really helped me understand this project

was Jacobsen’s “Make Your Move.” Jacobsen explains that there’s organizations and rules that

come with certain genres. In order to write successfully in our chosen genre, we must analyze all

the examples in that genre and find common similarities across all of them. Genres of different

forms follow a format specific to that genre in order to make it suitable for the audience reading

it. We wouldn’t want to read a eulogy written in the form of a rap song. Using this knowledge, I

was able to compile a list of true crime articles and find similarities across all of them.

Formatting and the information given such as the victim’s personality were some of the

similarities that I found. I thought that the actual translation process was a bit difficult but I

learned that you don’t have to include all the information from your article if you don’t need to.

For example, my genre did not need all the specific details of the scholarly article so I learned to

only incorporate the important conclusions.

The second writing project I worked on for this course was analyzing research articles on

one specific topic about writing and turning that into a conversation. Research articles

themselves are already considered to be scholarly conversations; by citing each other’s works,

researchers are effectively engaging in conversations with each other. This was my first time

actually researching articles but it won’t be the last. With all the practice that I’ve done in this

course, I feel more confident researching in the future. I know what keywords to search for and I
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am able to analyze multiple different research articles effectively to view different or the same

viewpoints in one conversation. I enjoyed putting together all of my articles into one

conversation and it was quite easy having all the researchers interact with each other. The hardest

part of this project for me would have to be reading through all the articles and having to decide

which side of the conversation they support. Thankfully, all of my articles reached the same

consensus so I did not have two sides arguing against each other.

One main skill we practiced throughout this quarter was the revision process. Revising is

a very tedious process and one article that helped me develop an effective revision process was

Giles’ “Reflective Writing and Revision Process.” Some revision methods I used from this

reading included the cover letter process. I used this in WP2 where I presented the cover letter

describing the process of picking the conversation as a narrative. Revision and reflection is also a

process that should be personal to the writer. I learned that it’s not about pleasing the teacher

when you reflect on a piece of writing but you can be brutally honest about how difficult or easy

the project was for you. I used to never really take the time to revise my work and my high

school teachers never punished me for it. This class was the first time that a reflection and

revision process was an assignment itself. Now I understand that reflective writing is extremely

beneficial to a writer. A reflective essay is where you can really examine your work and see what

you can improve on as well as seeing what process worked for you. Without the reflective and

revision process, I can’t improve as a writer and this class really helped me realize that these

processes are just as important as the projects themselves.

Throughout Writing 2, I feel as though I have improved as a writer. In high school, I

wrote just to finish my assignments but I never understood the writing process itself. One skill

that stuck with me since the beginning of this course was Bunn’s process of “Reading Like a
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Writer.” After learning how to read other’s work in order to incorporate their choices into my

own writing, I felt as if it made the bulk of the projects easier. I used to read articles just to

annotate and highlight the main points of what the author talks about. But now in addition to

that, I am also reading articles and papers as a writer and seeing how their writing can be used to

improve my own. For example, in Gile’s piece of “Reflective Writing and Revision Process,” I

read his example cover letter and followed the same format he used to answer the questions I

needed to in my own cover letter.

My favorite strategies would definitely have to be RLW and the revision process. It made

writing in this class so much easier. I can also apply these strategies to all of my future papers

and research throughout my years at UCSB. All of these strategies are going to be relevant going

forward. Although I might still struggle with writing processes such as writing an effective

reflection the first time around, it is always something I can continue to improve on. Overall, I’m

extremely pleased with all I have learned throughout Writing 2 and I can’t wait to continue my

journey as I take more English classes in the future.

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Citations

Bunn, Mike. "How to read like a writer." Writing spaces: Readings on writing 2 (2011): 71-86.

Giles, Sandra L. "Reflective Writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking?."

writingspaces (2010): 191.