Metacognitive Reflection

Annabel Gutierrez

WRIT 2

March 18, 2024

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Metacognitive Reflection

Coming into Writing 2, I was slightly nervous because I never considered myself as a

great writer. The English department, let alone writing, was not one of my strengths but after

taking this course, I have learned many things that have helped improve my writing skills to the

best of my ability. With taking Writing 1 my freshman year at UCSB, I felt I did not learn much

so when I finally secured a spot for Writing 2, my expectations were not that high but at the same

time I had this feeling of unpreparedness. After going through this course, I realized that Writing

2 has taught me so much more, resulting in me feeling more confident in writing that I can carry

to other courses in the future.

One of the readings we did in this course was “How to Read like a Writer” by Mike

Bunn. I never realized that reading can mean so much more when looking through a different

perspective. As Bunn says, you are reading to understand how the author or a piece of writing

was constructed and what you can learn about writing, not to overall understand the concepts of

the writing piece.1 This new piece of information has opened my eyes to better understanding

text read in class. Before this course, I struggled with organization skills in my writing. My

essays would turn out confusing and hard to follow but incorporating new writing techniques

such as how to properly organize essays from reading like a writer has overall made a significant

improvement in my essays.

A large factor to properly organizing my essays are outlines and freewrites. I’ve always

known outlines were crucial to a good essay but never realize how it impacts the quality of your

essay. PB2 and PB3 have shown me how much outlining helps your writing process. In PB2, I

was able to make a chart that answers the basic questions that needed to be included in WP1. In

1
Mike Bunn, “How to Read Like a Writer,” in Writing Spaces: Reading on Writing, Volume 2,
ed. Charley Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky (Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2011), 72.
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PB3, again, I included information that needed to be discussed in WP2. This helps the

information process become easier when it comes time to write the essays. Creating an outline

lays out all the information that is needed in your essay. I believe this is the hardest part of

writing because it's where you put in your effort. Although your essay is also very important, you

use your outline as a guide to writing your essay. This has helped me feel less overwhelmed with

writing. According to the reading, “Reflective writing and the revision process”, Giles mentions

it is okay for your freewrite to be messy because it is just to generate ideas and will not be

“nicely organized”. It is good to use outlines to organize your paper as a second step. 2 Using a

free write as your outline can become messy but using it to gather your ideas and putting your

thoughts on paper is helpful when creating an outline. I have had experience with using a free

write as my outline but ended up becoming overwhelmed, so using your freewrite to create an

outline is crucial for a successful paper.

Not only has an outline guided me into writing an essay, it allowed me to express my

individuality and creativity as a writer. Creating an outline has allowed me to create ideas to

what I can potentially include in my paper. My individuality appears from the self selection of

the articles and topics. My essays show more individuality when I write about something I am

remotely interested in instead of something specific. If I were to write about something I am not

interested in, I’ll feel like I'm forced to write something I do not enjoy, removing both creativity

and individuality from the essay.

Throughout my WP1 I found areas that needed more improvement so I chose to make

revisions to refine my essay. In the introduction paragraph, my roommate who peer reviewed my

paper mentioned making the intro more attention grabbing. I created a new hook which helps the
2
Sandra L. Giles, “Reflecting writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking?”,
Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, ed. Charley Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky,
(Parlor Press, 2010), 196.
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reader visualize and get attached to my essay instead of reading a topic sentence like before.

Professor Allison Bocchino gave me feedback as well, such as an issue in my thesis statement. I

didn’t differentiate the two disciplines where people can understand. When revising this section,

I made sure to include what makes each discipline different from one another. I also struggled

with topic sentences, for example, in the second paragraph, I did not make it clear what the

section was going to be about. Doing this helps the audience have a better understanding of the

paragraph instead of being confused. Within WP1, I have deleted some sentences, replacing

them with new ones because reading it a second time does not make sense. In paragraph three I

deleted the sentence and replaced it with, “While the psychology article uses methods with

experimental analysis, the architectural article uses historical analysis which plays a significant

role in research that is perfect for their type of researching style”. This change eliminates the

confusion on what I was trying to say before. In some areas in my essay, I noticed that there was

repetition. For example, I wrote two sentences that mentioned how the academic article was

meant for research purposes. I noticed that those two sentences can be created into one sentence

that conveyed the same meaning without repetition.

In WP2, I revised simple mistakes such as citations and footnotes noted by Professor

Allison Bocchino. I deleted my intext citation because it was not needed since I had footnotes. I

also added the first footnote citation because originally, I didn't add anything. Despite correcting

citation mistakes, I made revisions to my writing such as sentence structure that I found. For

example, in paragraph 4, I combined two sentences together by using a comma after “clean

side”. I wrote, “This connects with the academic article because by acknowledging her

appreciation for the clean side, it determines how individuals may have different opinions on the

same photo.” by adding a comma, it creates a continuation of the sentence, helping it flow better.
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Additionally, I also deleted and added sentences. Again in paragraph 4, I cut out the sentence that

starts with, “Adding this step shows…” because I felt like it was not relevant to the context of

the paragraph. Instead, I added “I left out any advanced vocabulary …” because this relates to

the sentence I paired with it more than the original text. A large change in my essay was adding a

couple sentences to my strategy paragraph (paragraph 4). For this correction, Professor Allison

Bocchino mentioned it would be helpful to explain the articles more. In the beginning of this

paragraph I add sentences that relate to the academic article. This way, the readers have

something to go off of when reading. Without this step, I noticed that my paragraph jumped

straight into explaining my strategy without explaining the connection between the experiment

from the article and the instagram post.

This quarter has taught me useful information that I will use in the future such as

knowing how to structure sentences and organize my papers. With the help of my professor,

Allison Bocchino and my roommate who read my papers, I was able to significantly improve and

revise my WPs. After this course, I can now say that my strongest feature is creating an outline

for myself that helps me decide how I will organize my paper. Although this process can get

messy from free writes, it helps me get all my thoughts and potential information I will add to

my final paper. After this course, my organizational skills have improved. My organization is

now a strength because of activities done in class and practice with my own WP1 and WP2.

Before this class, I used to smash paragraphs together, making them too long. Now, I understand

how an essay should be structured. Although I have some strengths, there is always room for

improvement. Still, I struggle with clarity in my sentences and paragraphs, causing them to lack

the expansion of information which makes it difficult for readers to understand the point I am

trying to get across. This issue may be improved with practice and more peer reviews. Next, my
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Chicago style citations could also be better. Chicago style footnotes were difficult for me because

I have never used them before this class. I struggled with understanding where to add a footnote

and where there shouldn't be one. Along with footnotes, knowing what format to use was also

difficult because there were separate citations for different types of writing such as books and

journal articles. This also got confusing because I didn’t know when to use the shorter version.

Although I have improved from the start, there is still so much more to learn which can come

with practice.

In further courses at UCSB, I can use tips and skills I learned in Writing 2 to better my

papers. For example, something I discovered is before you start writing, figure out your thesis

and topics. This helped me stay focused on knowing exactly what I needed to write about

without getting off track. This helps avoid unnecessary information not related to the topic. A

useful resource I found was very helpful in creating a thesis was the “Thesis Checklist” on

canvas. It tells you exactly what your thesis should look like and a checklist to make sure your

thesis matches the requirements.

To conclude, taking this course has only helped me grow as a writer. I have learned

techniques from organization and outlines to still working on improvement from clarity and

Chicago style footnotes. Now that I can detect the areas of improvements and strengths, I can be

better prepared for future classes in writing papers. This portfolio has helped me break down my

papers so I can clearly see where my mistakes were made and how to fix them. After receiving

feedback from my professor and even my roomate, I can now see the areas that need refinement.

This course has overall been very helpful and I can agree that I am more confident in my writing

skills compared to the beginning of this course.

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Bibliography

Bunn, Mike. “How to read like a Writer.” In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2,

edited by Charley Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 71-86. Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor

Press, 2011.

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

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, edited by Charley Lowe and Pavel

Zemliansky, 191–204. Parlor Press, 2010.