Sammi
Beach
December
8, 2015
Academic
Writing 310
Metacognitive
Reflection:
Throughout Writing
310 I have gained an extreme amount of knowledge. English has always been an
easy subject for me and have never really felt challenged in any of my previous
classes before, until I took this class. This class with Zack has made me think
about things within writing, which I have never thought about before. Between
all of the readings we had to project through blog posts, group discussions, journal
questions, and visual support I have furthered my critical thinking sills to
the fullest. All of the reflection that we have done with our class has
prepared me for our final paper/portfolios.
I’ve had friends
who have taken this class in the past quarters and told me I was going to love
it. What I appreciated the most about this class was the tone of the class in
general. The way Zack taught the class, it felt like, he was obviously my
teacher, but he made the interaction between teacher- students extremely
comfortable. The first couple of weeks of class was when I had my “aha! Moment”
when it came to terminology with academic writing. One the first articles we
read was: Murder! Rhetorical Speaking. This article really opened my eyes to
what rhetoric actually is. I’ve always heard the word being thrown around in
previous classes but never truly was able to grasp what it actually meant.
When Janet Boyd
explains the assignment given to her students which was, writing a report from
a detectives point of view based around the following information: who, what,
when, where, and why. When you are given a scenario such as this, as a writer
you automatically know the type of “tone” that needs to be used. When you are
being told to write from a detective’s point of view you wouldn’t use the tone
of if you were writing a column in the newspaper about “best restaurants in
town”. You would use the type of tone that is used from a detective’s point of
view, which is a more serious tone full of facts and a specific type of jargon.
Jargon is described as types of words that would be used in that type of field
that you wouldn’t typically use when describing something else. For example:
when describing a crime scene you would not use legal type words yet because
right now you are just talking about the crime scene. This article really gave
me insight on terminology about rhetoric and how to write in an academic paper
that I have internalized through studying/researching the topic of my paper.
When writing an
academic paper you need to know the “genre”. Before this class I have never
made the connection that genres can also be correlated to academic writing. The
examples shown in class helped me recognize that. When we listened to the four
country songs and created a table to what the class believed were the
components to the country songs and to see if they matched together by each
one, was a genre. The genre of country music typically talks about love,
alcohol, trucks, farms etc. By listening to each song almost every song fell
into the sub-points of what, we as a class, believed a country song was.
Another example
used for the genre lesson was horror films. We did the same thing that we did
for the country music genre. Almost every time the movie correlated to the table
we made as class. Horror films usually have scary/creepy music leading up to
what is going to happen next, knives, ghosts, blood, etc. By associating these
characteristics with the specific genre demonstrates what components needs to
be in that film to make it a horror film. It goes with writing; you chose a
genre and make the components of the paper build into that specific genre.
I thoroughly
enjoyed how everything tied into each other within every lesson taught. By
having journal questions every week to start off the class helped as little
recap of what is going on. Breaking off into groups before having a large class
discussion about it helped get my peers perspectives on certain things that we
were doing that week. I feel like it really brought the class together and
clarified what was going on and what was expected.
Thank you Zack for
such an amazing class. You have made my first quarter here at Antioch a fun
one, and that’s no bullshit! It’s a bummer to see you leave but I know you’re
going to kick ass wherever you go! This class has improved my writing
tremendously and I couldn’t thank you enough!
