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Zachary Haffner

Writing 2

Prof. Speiser

14 March 2017

Metacognitive Essay

Coming into this course, I was confident in my ability as a writer. I wasnt sure exactly

what to expect from Writing 2 was the professor going to mercilessly gouge my work or was I

going to meet the mark? Furthermore, I didnt even know what this University required course

entailed. Once learning the focus was on rhetoric and genre analysis, I felt comfortable and

confident to begin work. The theme of metacognitive analysis in Writing 2 was something akin

to the exorbitant number of close readings and poem analysis I did throughout high school. I was

fortunate to have excellent English instructors all through high school who helped instill some

good habits in me. Consequently, the central tropes of Writing 2 were familiar to me, just being

applied to genre and discourse communities.

This class provided a good opportunity to workshop my writing and my writing process. I

havent consciously made changes to my writing process since high school. I received As on all

my freshman year essays, so since nothing was broken, I didnt feel a need to fix anything.

College classes seldom devote any time to improvement and editing. Since university students

are expected to write at a certain level, the writing process is curtly replaced with a deadline. In

this way, Writing 2 differentiates itself form other college classes in that it actively fosters

growth through composition, editing, and repetition.

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A valuable lesson this course reinforced for me was to answer all parts of the prompt. In

constructing my thesis for Writing Project 1, I focused partially on comparing genres, like I

should have been, but also on another aspect of my topic, which happened to interest me.

Consequently, the process of writing the essay consisted of a constant struggle between staying

on topic and delving into another, less relevant, topic. The resulting paper was a jack of two

trades, but a master of neither. This conflict illustrates the, in my opinion, single most important

aspect of constructing an essay: the research question or thesis. This is the backbone of an essay

and needs to be clear, focused, and provable. A paper will suffer in the long run and struggle to

maintain focus if the thesis is not rock solid.

Another lesson that I took from Writing 2 is to try not to do too much with my papers.

Often times I find myself interested in multiple research questions regarding a single topic; this

comes through in the essay in the form of shallow analysis in abundance. By writing more and

more, I have come to realize that you have to choose your battles. Within the restrictions of a

given essay, one can either have meaningful and thought provoking analysis of a single idea, or

perfunctory analysis of multiple ideas. The former resulting in a superior paper, I have tried to

mitigate my short attention span in favor of maintaining more focus throughout the course of a

paper.

As a whole, Writing 2 was successful in both peaking my interest as well as using the

assignments to demonstrate the course goals. The creative freedom and lax, classroom setting

were refreshing but the constant project builders, forum posts, etc. felt tedious. The main course,

the writing projects, were enjoyable in that they provided an opportunity to practice different

types of writing, something college students seldom get a chance to do in other classes. By

allowing great flexibility in the topic selection in each writing project, the process of churning
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out something acceptable became easier to swallow. This class helped me learn about genre

through comparison, something I have never really done before. Looking at different discourse

communities and comparing their practices, tone, lexis, etc. allows you to understand their point

of view. Through this process of comparison, you obtain intellectual empathy and an ability to

understand things in ways that you couldnt before. Thank you to Writing 2 for expanding my

horizons. Hopefully in the future, I can use the lessons this class taught me to more effectively

communicate my ideas to others.