20 Reflective Writing

If “cognition” refers to the process of thinking, and to be “meta” is for something to comment on itself, then “meta-cognition” means to think about thinking. Composition scholars have found that metacognition allows students to transfer the skills they have learned in first-year writing into new writing situations beyond the classroom. Crystal VanKooten describes metacognition as students’ meta-awareness about different modes of composition, including not only writing words but also multimodal composition that draws on visuals, sounds, and movements.

To develop metacognition, you need to reflect upon your particular compositional choices and explain how and why those choices are or might be effective or ineffective within a rhetorical context. These reflections can be styled as essays, posted as videos or podcasts, submitted to discussion boards, or included in a cover letter that introduces or contextualizes your project.

In the context of Writing our Bodies, you will reflect in particular on the role of your body and how its postures and interactions with technology shaped the writing process and product.

Process

Consider the multiple phases of work involved in creating your finished product: brainstorming, research, outlining, drafting, receiving feedback, and revision. Some questions to consider can include:

1. How or why did you pick this topic, approach, or argument? What feelings did this topic invoke in you? How have your feelings evolved in the course of the project?
2. What kind of planning did you do for the project? How did those ways of organization (writing in a notebook vs. using a binder vs. setting up folders in Google Drive, for instance) shape the final product?
3. What challenges occurred along the way? How did you respond to these challenges? What decisions did you face, and how did you make those decisions?
4. How did comments from your peers and instructor help you? How did you engage with those comments in your revisions?
5. Which aspects of the writing process felt easy for you? Why?
6. Which aspects of the writing process felt difficult for you? Why?
7. What strategies worked best in your writing process?
8. What types of technology did you use throughout the composition process? In what ways did they facilitate your thinking and writing? In what ways did they interfere with your thinking and writing?
9. Project forward. What did you learn through this writing project? For your next writing project, how can you use what you’ve learned? Can you transfer this knowledge to other composing situations, in or out of the classroom?

Rhetoric

Analyze the rhetorical situation of your own writing by considering questions of purpose, audience, text, and exigence. Some questions to consider can include:

1. Exigency: What motivates your text? Why is it needed, and what problems is it trying to resolve? What are its goals?
2. Author: What kind of lived experiences and/or authority do you have with regard to the subject? How invested are you? How have these values influenced the composition? What identity are you trying to project as the creator of this text?
3. Audience: Who is your audience? What are their backgrounds, values, and interests? How are they situated in the world? What are their lived realities? In what embodied contexts are they receiving your text? How open are they to you and your composition?

Rhetorical choices/compositional techniques

Given the rhetorical situation of your piece, consider what specific compositional techniques you utilized and how they aim to fulfill your overall purpose and goals. Techniques can be linguistic (for example, using transitional wording), audiovisual (for example, juxtaposing an image and a song), and bodily (how you place and/or move your body in response to your audience). Some questions to consider:

1. What rhetorical appeals did you make given your particular audience? What word, multimedia, and/or bodily choices did you make?
2. What medium did you choose to compose in? Did you write a traditional essay? Create a presentation, video, podcast, or website? How does this medium help accomplish your goals?