METACOGNITIVE REFLECTION
Angelica Askamp
Antioch University
I remember before I attended the academic writing class, and I saw the subject on my class schedule. I just thought, academic writing? Ok, well it would probably be a class about how we should write ‘academic’ and the whole formal and serious writing style that comes with it. Then I entered the class for the first time and Zack was giving us a brief explanation of what academic writing and the whole class is about. I figured out that it is literally is about writing, like everything that has to do with writing. I had no idea that there was someone in this world who actually came up with all these statements and definitions about anything that has to do with writing, I mean who would even do that? So from that moment on it did pretty much caught my attention because I have never been a really bad writer, but I realized that with this class it is going to go to a whole different level. I was kind of scared, because as an international student I unfortunately do not have the great vocabulary as any other born and raised American, and this does really hold me back a lot of times when it comes to writing in English. But you know, let’s just see how this goes.
The first thing that we were told to do, is to create a blog on blogger.com. On that blog, we had to post all the assignments that we were supposed to do for the class. I have never really been into blogging, so also had now idea how a blog works. The first thing we had to post on there was an about me post, just basically a simple story about who you are and let the other classmates take a brief look into your life. I already liked this assignment a lot because I did not know that much about my classmates yet so it was really interesting to read about them and their interests etc. For the second week, we also had some assigned readings that we had to read and we had to write a reading reflection about that and put that on our blog.
There were two articles we had to read: Understanding rhetoric and everything’s an argument. Now when I opened Understanding Rhetoric, I just thought: “What on earth is this?!”. It was like viewed and written in this comic book kind of way and it was just really uncomfortable to read it. What I did think was interesting was reading about ‘Rhetoric’. I had no idea what rhetoric even was, but the reading and actually throughout the whole course it made me understand what it is.
Later on in the course, we got to hear that we have an assignment to do, which eventually is collecting artifacts from a individual working person and after we would’ve had to interview them about the collected artifacts. Before that, we had to make up a professional e-mail request where we would ask the working individual if they would be able to help us with our assignment. I must say, I never really had a problem with writing professionally if it comes to something like that, but there are definitely things I’ve learned. The biggest thing that I’ve learned from that assignment is to include like some small information about yourself at the end of the e-mail.
For example when I end with something like best or kind regards, under that it would say something as: Angelica Askamp, BA Psychology student at AUSB, etc. I knew that people would do this, but I thought this was more functional for people who were working in a professional field and as I do not work and am just a student, I didn’t know that it would still be beneficial to include that. So that was definitely an eye opener for me.
Eventually, when we had contacted our potential artifact and interview person, we would need to ask them to send us artifacts that we could analyze and after that we had to schedule an interview with them and ask them about the collected artifacts. This was a pretty interesting assignment to me, because I did not really know what to do when it came to analyzing the artifacts. I didn’t really have such clear eyes yet for that so I was kind of hesitating what do to.
I had contacted the writing center at Antioch University to help me with analyzing the artifacts and coming up with potential interview questions regarding those artifacts. The writing center had really helped me a lot with that and I was confident for my interview. I met up with the person (Kristine), and had interviewed her. This all went ok, not as I hoped it would go as the answers to the questions weren’t clear enough for my next assignment, but it could’ve been worse.
After collecting those artifacts and interviewing our potential person, the biggest assignment was about to come. It was the final paper. This final paper was all about the artifacts that we had collected and the interview data. Now this paper needed a thesis statement. I was really not happy with that because I had only done it once and all I could remember is that I did not like it at all. I guess over time it will make it easier to create a thesis statement paper, but at that moment it was just a rock for me. Now I did not want to be lost and all over the place, so I had contacted the writing center again to help me with that thesis statement. It took a while, but I finally came up with one and was a lot more confident to write my final paper. Yet, I was not looking forward to it at all. Don’t get me wrong, the class has definitely been interesting and has added a lot of new information that I did not know about before and will definitely be beneficial to know in the future. But, the whole writing thing has just not been very appealing to me and maybe it is also because I am not so confident yet with writing in English, but it is just a bit intimidating writing a paper for a teacher that actually knows almost everything about writing and is very critical with the writing process for this paper. Also, I just think that if you have to write a paper for or about something that you’re not too interested in, it just doesn’t give you the motivation that you would like to get.
Anyways, this paper still had to be written and it really took me a while to figure out how or where to start. This also again took a while, but as soon as I figured it all out it was getting easier than before to write this paper. While even though I do not have the best English vocabulary, I do feel like I am good at writing papers and have always been pretty strong at it. But, there was a problem when it came to this paper. I had mentioned before that I had to interview Kristine and I honestly felt like I had created really good interview questions. But when I actually listened back at the whole interview (I recorded it with Kristine’s permission), I realized that there actually hadn’t been that much efficient information that she has given me for me to include it in my paper. Now there could have been an option to call her back and maybe schedule another interview with her, but unfortunately Kristine is a very busy working professional and I was already lucky enough to have 30 minutes of her free time for one interview. So I just had to work with what I got.
I am writing this now after having finished my paper, and so I think it would be a good idea to talk about what I have learned from the paper. I kind of figured that this probably wouldn’t be my best written paper, but Zack has been very helpful. I am really glad that Zack has given us the opportunity to send him our rough draft, and for him to give feedback on that whole paper so that we could still adjust it and make it much better than it was before.
This gave me the opportunity to also have a critical view for myself and that I was able to realize what I did wrong, and what I should pay attention to in the future.
I would like to end this paper with a general explanation of how this course has changed me/my life and things related to that. So I mentioned that before I started this class, I did not even know that a whole class about just writing would even exist. So the way that this has changed my life, is that I definitely gained a lot more respect for writing and I have realized that there is so much more about writing than we think. My major is Psychology, but I would like to eventually develop myself in the criminal justice world. I am sure that within both of these fields, writing is an essential thing. Communication is very important and writing is a form of communication. There is also a lot of research that gets involved with this so it is very important. So I do really think that I will be able to benefit from this class as soon as I will enter in those working fields. I feel that as being a writer myself, I have changed in a way where I do look more critically at the way I write and pay much more attention to it than that I did before.
As in the trips and tricks I’ve learned, I think there is one thing that stood by to me the most, and that is using—this—. I would usually use brackets but have learned that this is a much better thing to use. Unfortunately, I don’t apply it yet as much as I would like to but it is definitely something that I will keep remembering.
Overall, this class has changed my perspective on writing and I think it is pretty cool that from now on there are many people that I could briefly teach a lesson about writing and make them realize that it is much more than they would probably think, because it is seriously underestimated and it is pretty fascinating to discover all of the things that come with writing and it is a never ending process and lesson. I also feel like I definitely need to stay patient. I was not too happy with the fact that there is a whole process when it comes to writing, where you need to have a rough draft, look back at that, write again, another draft, etc etc. I just want to write everything in once, maybe twice. But I don’t really have the patience to go through the whole process. I guess it will all just take time, but it is not as easy as I thought it was. I just hope that I will keep on learning things and techniques when it comes to writing, and that this will also give me a lot more confidence when it comes to writing English papers. Even though my vocabulary won’t be the best, it would be great to still blow people away with having great writing skills instead!
Angelica Askamp
Antioch University
I remember before I attended the academic writing class, and I saw the subject on my class schedule. I just thought, academic writing? Ok, well it would probably be a class about how we should write ‘academic’ and the whole formal and serious writing style that comes with it. Then I entered the class for the first time and Zack was giving us a brief explanation of what academic writing and the whole class is about. I figured out that it is literally is about writing, like everything that has to do with writing. I had no idea that there was someone in this world who actually came up with all these statements and definitions about anything that has to do with writing, I mean who would even do that? So from that moment on it did pretty much caught my attention because I have never been a really bad writer, but I realized that with this class it is going to go to a whole different level. I was kind of scared, because as an international student I unfortunately do not have the great vocabulary as any other born and raised American, and this does really hold me back a lot of times when it comes to writing in English. But you know, let’s just see how this goes.
The first thing that we were told to do, is to create a blog on blogger.com. On that blog, we had to post all the assignments that we were supposed to do for the class. I have never really been into blogging, so also had now idea how a blog works. The first thing we had to post on there was an about me post, just basically a simple story about who you are and let the other classmates take a brief look into your life. I already liked this assignment a lot because I did not know that much about my classmates yet so it was really interesting to read about them and their interests etc. For the second week, we also had some assigned readings that we had to read and we had to write a reading reflection about that and put that on our blog.
There were two articles we had to read: Understanding rhetoric and everything’s an argument. Now when I opened Understanding Rhetoric, I just thought: “What on earth is this?!”. It was like viewed and written in this comic book kind of way and it was just really uncomfortable to read it. What I did think was interesting was reading about ‘Rhetoric’. I had no idea what rhetoric even was, but the reading and actually throughout the whole course it made me understand what it is.
Later on in the course, we got to hear that we have an assignment to do, which eventually is collecting artifacts from a individual working person and after we would’ve had to interview them about the collected artifacts. Before that, we had to make up a professional e-mail request where we would ask the working individual if they would be able to help us with our assignment. I must say, I never really had a problem with writing professionally if it comes to something like that, but there are definitely things I’ve learned. The biggest thing that I’ve learned from that assignment is to include like some small information about yourself at the end of the e-mail.
For example when I end with something like best or kind regards, under that it would say something as: Angelica Askamp, BA Psychology student at AUSB, etc. I knew that people would do this, but I thought this was more functional for people who were working in a professional field and as I do not work and am just a student, I didn’t know that it would still be beneficial to include that. So that was definitely an eye opener for me.
Eventually, when we had contacted our potential artifact and interview person, we would need to ask them to send us artifacts that we could analyze and after that we had to schedule an interview with them and ask them about the collected artifacts. This was a pretty interesting assignment to me, because I did not really know what to do when it came to analyzing the artifacts. I didn’t really have such clear eyes yet for that so I was kind of hesitating what do to.
I had contacted the writing center at Antioch University to help me with analyzing the artifacts and coming up with potential interview questions regarding those artifacts. The writing center had really helped me a lot with that and I was confident for my interview. I met up with the person (Kristine), and had interviewed her. This all went ok, not as I hoped it would go as the answers to the questions weren’t clear enough for my next assignment, but it could’ve been worse.
After collecting those artifacts and interviewing our potential person, the biggest assignment was about to come. It was the final paper. This final paper was all about the artifacts that we had collected and the interview data. Now this paper needed a thesis statement. I was really not happy with that because I had only done it once and all I could remember is that I did not like it at all. I guess over time it will make it easier to create a thesis statement paper, but at that moment it was just a rock for me. Now I did not want to be lost and all over the place, so I had contacted the writing center again to help me with that thesis statement. It took a while, but I finally came up with one and was a lot more confident to write my final paper. Yet, I was not looking forward to it at all. Don’t get me wrong, the class has definitely been interesting and has added a lot of new information that I did not know about before and will definitely be beneficial to know in the future. But, the whole writing thing has just not been very appealing to me and maybe it is also because I am not so confident yet with writing in English, but it is just a bit intimidating writing a paper for a teacher that actually knows almost everything about writing and is very critical with the writing process for this paper. Also, I just think that if you have to write a paper for or about something that you’re not too interested in, it just doesn’t give you the motivation that you would like to get.
Anyways, this paper still had to be written and it really took me a while to figure out how or where to start. This also again took a while, but as soon as I figured it all out it was getting easier than before to write this paper. While even though I do not have the best English vocabulary, I do feel like I am good at writing papers and have always been pretty strong at it. But, there was a problem when it came to this paper. I had mentioned before that I had to interview Kristine and I honestly felt like I had created really good interview questions. But when I actually listened back at the whole interview (I recorded it with Kristine’s permission), I realized that there actually hadn’t been that much efficient information that she has given me for me to include it in my paper. Now there could have been an option to call her back and maybe schedule another interview with her, but unfortunately Kristine is a very busy working professional and I was already lucky enough to have 30 minutes of her free time for one interview. So I just had to work with what I got.
I am writing this now after having finished my paper, and so I think it would be a good idea to talk about what I have learned from the paper. I kind of figured that this probably wouldn’t be my best written paper, but Zack has been very helpful. I am really glad that Zack has given us the opportunity to send him our rough draft, and for him to give feedback on that whole paper so that we could still adjust it and make it much better than it was before.
This gave me the opportunity to also have a critical view for myself and that I was able to realize what I did wrong, and what I should pay attention to in the future.
I would like to end this paper with a general explanation of how this course has changed me/my life and things related to that. So I mentioned that before I started this class, I did not even know that a whole class about just writing would even exist. So the way that this has changed my life, is that I definitely gained a lot more respect for writing and I have realized that there is so much more about writing than we think. My major is Psychology, but I would like to eventually develop myself in the criminal justice world. I am sure that within both of these fields, writing is an essential thing. Communication is very important and writing is a form of communication. There is also a lot of research that gets involved with this so it is very important. So I do really think that I will be able to benefit from this class as soon as I will enter in those working fields. I feel that as being a writer myself, I have changed in a way where I do look more critically at the way I write and pay much more attention to it than that I did before.
As in the trips and tricks I’ve learned, I think there is one thing that stood by to me the most, and that is using—this—. I would usually use brackets but have learned that this is a much better thing to use. Unfortunately, I don’t apply it yet as much as I would like to but it is definitely something that I will keep remembering.
Overall, this class has changed my perspective on writing and I think it is pretty cool that from now on there are many people that I could briefly teach a lesson about writing and make them realize that it is much more than they would probably think, because it is seriously underestimated and it is pretty fascinating to discover all of the things that come with writing and it is a never ending process and lesson. I also feel like I definitely need to stay patient. I was not too happy with the fact that there is a whole process when it comes to writing, where you need to have a rough draft, look back at that, write again, another draft, etc etc. I just want to write everything in once, maybe twice. But I don’t really have the patience to go through the whole process. I guess it will all just take time, but it is not as easy as I thought it was. I just hope that I will keep on learning things and techniques when it comes to writing, and that this will also give me a lot more confidence when it comes to writing English papers. Even though my vocabulary won’t be the best, it would be great to still blow people away with having great writing skills instead!
No comments:
Post a Comment