Dominic Kirby

H De Piero

Zac

Writing 2
12/7/15
Metacognitive Reflection
My story of Writing 2 is one of love and loss, romance and danger, deception and bacon.
...

J.K.

It is mostly a story of my internal battle between first order thinking vs second

order thinking. As the quarter unfolded, I could slowly see my first order thinking being molded
by my second order thinking into something somewhat readable. I have never been a good
writer. My writing consistently has poor structure/organization, simple grammar/spelling
mistakes, and a plastic tone. My first order brain is to blame for this, and at the end of the day,
first order skills are really hard to change; however, this class has helped me developed my
second order skills. This has been my journey.
Coming into this class, I hadnt written anything of consequence in almost a year, and I
was not looking forward to it. Besides my 11th grade teacher, every english teacher I had was a
carbon copy of each other. We read books, did vocab tests, and then wrote essays that were
supposed to incorporate them together. I didnt mind the reading or vocab tests that much, but I
absolutely despised the essays. This gave me a hatred of writing that I still havnt been able to
shake. I was expected more or less of the same thing coming into this class, but to my surprise, it
was made clear from the very beginning that this would not be a cookie cutter class. I was filled
with a sense of dread the first couple days of class because of this. I didnt enjoy the cookie

cutter classes per se, but I knew how to handle them. The openness and freedom of this class
scared me at first, then I learned to fully embrace it, and that was my first mistake.
In my WP3 I used a Henry David Thoreau quote, I wanted to live deep and suck out all
the marrow of life. Robin Williams in Dead Poet Society responds to this with, "Sucking the
marrow out of life doesn't mean choking on the bone." In WP1, I think I choked on the bone.
My blog posts and PB1s had shown me that people like it when you write differently than
everyone else, so I thought that in WP1 I would follow this trend and write something
completely different. I flew way too close to the sun. I disregarded what my peer readers said, I
disregarded all the warning you gave out in class, and I disregarded all the activities we did.
When we did the Highlighter activity, I remember that almost all of mine was cyan, the color I
was using for exposition. I didnt see a problem with it; I thought that the world wanted to hear
me exposiate. All of this led to my WP1 being complete crap.
To be fair to myself, I didnt fully understand what I was supposed to be doing, so I just
tried to wing it. But, I thought I was doing a great job. When my grade came back and it was a 7,
I was mortified. Now, when I reread my WP1 to edit it, I was mortified that I even put my name
on something so terrible. The problem was too much unrestricted first order thinking; I let it run
wild. It sounded like I was trying to write a play or something rather than talking about the topic.
I did almost nothing that the prompt asked, but I was still so upset about my grade. So much so
that it affected my later writings up to WP2.
In WP2 I reined in my first order thinking in almost every way besides my thesis. My
original thesis was weird, I will be trying to convince you, the reader, that Nihilism can be a

way to obtain absolute freedom. It has nothing to do with the class. I wrote it to rebel against
what I thought an overloaded prompt. There were so many questions to answer that it felt more

like a reading test than an essay, so to spice it up, I thought I would try to say something
interesting as I answered the questions of the prompt. This led to an essay that lacked an identity.
It was confused, just like I was, on what it was trying to be. In it, you can truly see the duality of
first order vs second order thinking. My analysis of moves and identification of audience and
purpose were second order thinking, whereas my rambling on the pros of nihilism were first
order. I messed up. Instead of using first and second order thinking in combination with each
other, I made them battle each other. Still it was a huge improvement from WP1.
I got an okay grade on it, but most of my thesis based stuff seemed to undermine my
score, which makes sense because it had nothing to do with the class. This furthered encouraged
me to do more second order thinking rather that relying on first order. Unfortunately, due to other
classes, I was not able to implement my new knowledge of balance in WP3. I spent very little
time on WP3 and it showed. I wish I could have spent more time on it, because I thought it wa a
really cool idea. It also coincided when I was finally starting to understand this class.
I dont know why, but this class seemed very disjointed to me until around the time of the
online class. It seemed like we were going from subject to subject that were meant to
individually help certain parts of our writing, Maybe it was because I am so used to math classes
where you might build on previous knowledge, but you dont use it all at once. And yet this was
what writing requires out of you. Connect all the ideas you have about writing to show as much
to the reader as you can. I tried to do this when editing my WPs for the portfolio. Its hard. I

forsure stuck the balance I wanted between first order and second order thinking; I tried to write
like a reader. We will see what you think of them I guess.

The biggest skill I gained in this class was reading like a writer. My dad is a lawyer. He is
also a great writer( awards in college and whatnot). He has always told me that reading is the key
to becoming a good writer. I always thought he was full of shit. I read a ton when I was younger
and still do now. It didnt seem to help me write anything that wouldnt make the chalkboard
screech as I turned it in. It finally makes sense to me. The act of reading by itself doesnt
improve writing all that much, you have to read through the lense of the writer. Each decision a
writer makes is a clue into what they are trying to have the reader to get out of it. I am also in a
Comparative Literature class this quarter, and I cannot help but see choices being made by the
various writers and reasons for these choices. This really helped me in that class because the
motives of the writer become clear to me and helped me understand what the purpose of each
book was.
The other big takeaway for me was the genre identification portion of the class. Odds are
I will never be a professional writer. However, I will probably still have to write in my career.
The ability to understand the purpose and identify the audience of the genre that you are writing
has to be invaluable in the professional world. It is the key to writing something that both fulfills
the purpose of the writing and conforms to the expectation of the audience. That is the essence of
writing something professionally. I feel confident that if I am ever in a situation that needs this, I
will be able to do it well because of the genre stuff we learned in this class.