Lucas Funaro

UCSB, Writing 2 – Prof. Allison Bocchino

Metacognitive Reflection

“Looking at the past must only be a means of

understanding more clearly what and who you are –

so you can more wisely build the future”, Paulo

Freire
As an international student, I can confidently say that one of my biggest fears of coming

to university in the United States was being unable to properly express my ideas, either through

writing or speech. Being able to communicate in one language doesn’t necessarily mean that one

will have the same rhetorical ability or the same set of vocabulary than when using other non-

native languages. During my learning process here, many different colleagues and professors

contributed to my skills as an English writer and communicator, either by teaching me new

vocabulary or by providing new useful resources. Despite all of those who helped me become

more comfortable with a foreign language, the most important contributors to my personal

writing journey were, without a doubt, the Writing 1 and Writing 2 courses. All of the individual

assignments from this quarter contributed in a specific way to the set of skills that I have access

to today and, as a whole, the class not only taught me how to effectively write better but also

how to read, think, and revise as a writer.

I would like to start my reflection thinking about how the weekly journals completed

throughout the quarter helped me to attain greater self-knowledge and to compose better drafts.

Despite the small significance of the journals to my overall grade in this course, they basically

consisted of some level of personal reflection upon either a reading or activity done over the
week, followed by a short freewriting paragraph. Such exercise made it possible for me to

reinforce the main ideas of each reading and forced me to think about how these new ideas could

be directly applied into my own essays. Besides that, the prompt of each journal served almost as

a guide in the sense that it highlighted the important information in a reading and what I should

pay attention to when composing my pieces of writing. Journal #5, for example, asked me to

“consider what arguments the authors make, what evidence they use to support their argument,

and how they organize their essays.” By asking such questions, the prompt is both guiding me

through the readings and teaching me which characteristics of the text, such as argumentation

and organization, I should focus on when creating my texts. In addition, I believe that the

journals were a good opportunity to practice what Peter Elbow defined as “first-draft exploratory

writing” in which the author rejects any type of “planning, control, organizing, and censoring” ,1

focusing primarily on the flow of concepts. As someone who never had a personal journal or

practiced freewriting as a hobby, these weekly journals served as the perfect space to practice

letting my mind go and just putting ideas down without worrying about having a polished final

result. By practicing with the journals, I believe that my drafts for the WPs were done in a more

effective way and I wasn’t as self-conscious during writing as I once was before.

Another important skill that I obtained during the course of Writing 2 was how to

properly read an academic paper (even when I am not an expert on the topic). This skill is

especially important to me since once day I hope to become a researcher and possibly publish my

own papers in biology journals. When reading Karen Rosenberg’s text on strategies that one can

learn to approach a scholarly source, it became clear to me that I had to take into consideration

several implicit and explicit characteristics of the text in order to fully, or at least better,

1
Peter Elbow, “Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching”, Oxford U press, New York, 1986.
comprehend what the author is saying.2 Previously, I used to passively read through articles from

start to finish which, at first, sounds like the standard way of reading but it is not the most

effective way to recognize the main argument being made by the author. The best way of

achieving this last goal, according to the author, is by doing a deeper analysis and thinking about

who the primary audience of the text might be, what was the purpose of the text, and what is the

paper’s contribution to the body of knowledge. Another relevant point made by Rosenberg was

that it is best to read the articles out of order, skimming through several sections, as a means of

rapidly find the main thesis.

However, even more important than learning how to approach scholarly essays was

learning different techniques involved in the process of revising a paper. As we approached the

final weeks of the quarter and got closer and closer to the portfolio due date, our focus turned to

how to revise our own texts. The first step was learning how to deconstruct a paper, which I

learned through the exercise “deconstructing WP1” on week 9. During the exercise, I had to

identify the main point that was being made in each paragraph, the evidence for that point, the

quotes that were included in the text, as well as other supporting elements present in the

paragraph. By doing so, I was able to clearly and quickly locate parts of the text that needed

revision or lacked important evidence to support the main point of the paragraph. This exercise

was really useful and is a nice revising strategy that I will definitely apply to future projects and

as I continue to move through college.

After completing the deconstruction exercise and getting some practice with revising, I

started working on the final project, the portfolio. It was time to apply basically all of the

principles of writing that we have been learning this whole quarter into my own work. The first

2
Karen Rosenberg, “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources”, in Writing Spaces: Readings on
Writing, vol. 2 (Parlor Press, 2011), pp. 210-220.
step was working on what was considered a major concern and needed major changes. So, with

that in mind, I decided to begin by fixing the general formatting and organization of WP2. For

this particular assignment, I spend an extremely long amount of time trying to find ways of

transforming my “Twitter script” into a Twitter thread that resembled the format of the app itself.

I tried to create fake accounts, but they all failed since I had to verify the user’s information and

provide a phone number. Then, I tried to make many individual Twitter posts with my personal

account to take screenshots and edit them together using an image editing program, such as

Photoshop, which turned out to be too time consuming and I also did not have the required

abilities to operate the program. Finally, I was able to find a website called Wonhowto.com that

offers a platform for creating fake tweets, comments, and private chats.

Besides the major Twitter-formatting problem, the other major concern that I had with

both my WPs was regarding the syntax of citations. The evidence that I used to support my

arguments in the two texts was in the form of quotations taken from either the primary academic

journals or the referenced readings from the class. My main problem, though, came from the

quotations not being properly integrated into the grammar of the sentence which culminated in a

bad reading flow and unclear/ambiguous sentences. Fixing the syntax of the quotations made me

not only review the mechanics, such as punctuation and wording, but the content and main ideas

of the quotations themselves. Thus, it is possible to say that revising the citations changed more

than just minor grammar mistakes, allowing me to reflect upon the overall message that I was

conveying to the reader.

Overall, it is possible to affirm that the Writing 2 course was a space of personal growth.

During the time I spent doing work for this class, I learned how to critically read texts of others

and incorporate newly discovered writing strategies into my own essays. Improving the manner
in which I compose my texts was definitely a major outcome of this quarter, but it was not the

only one: reading academic papers more effectively, constructing revision matrixes, and getting

comfortable with exploratory drafting are just a few examples of all the beneficial skills that this

class provided me with and that I will most certainly take for life.

WORKS CITED

Freire, Paulo, 1921-1997. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000.

Elbow, Peter. “Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching”, Oxford U

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources”, in