Metacognitive Reflection

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!