Metacognative Reflection
Looking back at all the journals I had done at the start of the year, I realized I was lost, unconfident in my abilities, and had no idea about how to create a profile of myself. I had no idea about the process and had no idea where to start. Then, I read Elbow’s “Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing” which was probably one of the most useful articles of Writing 2. Reflecting, now, about my process I realize that both kinds of “thinking” are crucial to creating the best writing. According to Elbow, there is first-order thinking and second-order thinking. First-order thinking is “creative”, “intuitive”, and has little “conscious direction or control” which gets the writer to unleash all the fresh ideas and insights that create exploration. It’s a lot of brainstorming and getting out all the ideas that come to mind about the question at hand. Its free-writing that lets you put down all of the uncensored words, descriptive thinking, and related stories. However, this type of uncensored writing does not include much reflection. So, in order to really make understanding of your first-order writing, you “engage in critical assessment and revision” (Elbow, 61). These two types of thinking work hand-in-hand and both are needed in order to enhance the writing process. When you step outside of your thinking to really critically revise (second-order thinking) you have the rich material available to you that was brainstored in pre-writing (first-order thinking).
I used this process for the first time in Writing Project 1 and it turned out to be extremely useful and successful for me. Through first-order thinking I developed many ideas about my journey up until now. This free writing let me follow my journey and then the critical analysis in second-order thinking allowed me to define my journey. I brainstormed many life events from what I could remember throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school that had to do with writing. Writing was a bigger part of my life than I realized. I saw this and I found a way I could define my journey. However, there was a parallel of my journey to the life cycle of a butterfly. I found that I could divide these life events into three parts and create this project that was a metaphor to a butterfly going through metamorphosis. As cheesy as it is, I found this metaphor to capture perfectly what my journey as a writer was and is like. Certain feelings are evoked when we think about each stage of the life cycle of a butterfly as we relate to human experiences. The caterpillar can evoke feelings of freedom, learning, youthfulness, and innocence. This stage directly correlated with my days in elementary and the way I saw writing as a leisure-activity. The cocoon can evoke feelings of weakness, fear, uncertainty, and doubtfulness. This is the part of my life that I grew new attitudes toward writing and became lost. The metamorphosis of a butterfly evokes feelings of confidence, maturity, adulthood, and freedom. This began with the fresh slate that I am now beginning to experience with college writing. By defining my journey of going through a trajectory in my writing career and identifying a parallel to the metamorphosis of a butterfly, the journey is clearly rendered to myself and to my audience. It is clear that the feelings and emotions are captured as we transition over each part of my life as a writer.
This project I feel has an audience and that is you. But I also feel like I am my own audience to this project because as I type these words I am learning, I am not telling a story that is one and done. I am telling a story that is still happening as we speak. Over these past several weeks, I have learned a lot about myself as a person, but, more, as a writer because that is what this project was all about. These are the insights that I have reached about myself. I have seen a change happen and I came to the understanding that all writing, just like life, is a work-in-progress. To get this project written I had to develop many ideas and details about my younger life, reflect, and realize what kind of writer I became. I developed a metaphor and placed each part of my writer transition with each transition of the life cycle of a butterfly. I felt that I engaged the readers in my writing by creating these moments that all had a meaning. The moment of journaling as a kid, the moment of holding a position for my middle school newspaper, the moment of writing in high school, are all chosen to be able to come together and create this story for me.
In McCloud’s “Writing with Pictures” he clearly illustrates through a comic the way the best writing communicates to an audience something that they can care enough about to stick around and finish reading it. This included choice of moment, frame, image, word, and flow which are all important and any change in these can change the whole meaning of your writing. All five of these choices can be applied to writing and can come together to project clarity to your reader and “communicating with clarity” is what is needed to communicate your understanding to your reader (37). This article was very useful when thinking about revising Writing Project 1. It forces you to define your moments, analyze them, and make changes to them.
If there is anything that I have learned from this project it is that I am able to come back and strive out of murky waters. I am able to turn a bad situation into a good one and see the brighter side at the end of the tunnel. When my writing project was lost, it meant that I had to do a lot of reflecting, remembering, and thinking back about this project without actually having the skeleton of it. This was actually a very interesting experience to create my own hybrid project. I was in deep metacognitive reflection attempting to remember and reflect on something that I had already reflected on. It made me re-see things that I did in my project that I hadn’t seen before. For instance, when trying to remember and use first-order thinking about what Writing Project 1 included, I was thinking twice already about all the possible outcomes of my profile. This forced me to have to actually define the moments again, put them back together, and even find new moments that I could include in my profile as a writer. It was almost like putting back together the puzzle after you already did it once. Things were familiar to me, however I found new ways to see the bigger picture. I was able to make more connections with my project because I was coming at it a second time. It was difficult but, alas, it all came together in the end and I really felt like I owned this project.