MEMORANDUM

To: Dr. D’Angelo

From: Lauren Balconi
Date: March 2, 2020
Re: Metacognitive Statement

1. Growth

Overall, I found the feedback that I received in this class to be very helpful to my writing
growth. In my undergraduate program, I never got a lot of use out of the feedback I was given
on my different writings because we were only ever really taught to look at the surface level of
any given piece of writing. I’ve always been a pretty decent writer, so I was never really
challenged to look deeper into my own writing. However, this class really hammered home the
things that I should have been working on all through undergrad, which I think can be summed
up into two broad categories: adding detail and adding analysis. I actually mentioned this in my
first revision plan when I said that “I have a bad habit of jumping from Point A to Point F and
assuming everyone will keep up with me.” This has always been something that I’ve done and
clearly need to work on if I’m going to be a good technical communicator. There’s a fine line
between underexplaining and overexplaining, and I always tend to err on the side of less
description because I assume my reader will keep up with me, or that they will be bored by
excessive amounts of description, even if that would help them to understand what I’m saying.
In the future, I may try experimenting with attempting to overexplain myself to see if that adds
anything to my writing. If nothing else, I will have a lot more raw material going into the final
draft stage.

Although most of my discussion thus far has been focused on adding detail and description, I
think the same issue applies to my analysis: mainly, that I usually need to add more of it. This
relates back to the problem I stated earlier, that I assume my reader is just keeping up with me
and will make the same connections between two points that I have made. However, this is
obviously not the case based on the feedback I have received in this course. The deeper
problem here, however, is that much of the time, I feel as though my analysis is too simple, and
so I begin to repeat myself and rephrase what I am trying to say in different ways in the same
paragraph. I think the thing I need to focus on here comes from the comments I received in
both the third and fourth module; namely, asking the question “why?” I tend to skip over this
because again, the point that I am trying to make is very clear to me, but I should work on
spelling it out for the reader.

My work in Eli Review helped me become a better reviewer because I improved my ability to
describe what I was seeing and then evaluate it, as well as ask questions to hopefully get the
writer’s mind thinking about their next step. Looking at the feedback I gave, I believe I improved
in offering more specific suggestions in my feedback, using a respectful tone, and becoming
more motivated to improve as a reviewer. Regarding the specific suggestions, I think I began
improving in this more when we were give the ability to include the contextual comments that
linked directly to the part of the assignment that I was speaking about. This is how I have
always been used to giving feedback, as opposed to summing up my thoughts in the end, like in
the first few peer reviews. Also, I am a little out of practice in giving feedback, as it was
something I did a lot during my undergraduate program as one of my jobs as a writing tutor, so
I had to remember how to use those skills. This also relates to using a respectful tone. In the
past few years, I have mostly given feedback to a close friend of mine on her creative pieces, so
I tend to joke around with her a little more, as well as be much harsher on things that are a
recurring issue in her writing. However, with this class, I think I initially erred on the side of
being a little too nice in some of my comments while I was gaining my footing. And then, in
some of the later comments, I could tell that I was not being respectful enough of everyone’s
work (looking back at the comments I’m thinking of in Module 5, I was clearly struggling with
this). However, by the end of the class, I think (and hope!) I hit a nice balance. This brings me to
the final place that I think I improved on the most: being motivated to become a better
reviewer. I’ll admit, I probably came into this class a little too confident in my abilities. After all,
I had been paid to review people’s work in college, so what should be so hard about this?
However, I really struggled with the describe-evaluate-suggest model in the beginning because I
felt like I was doing that. However, as I got more used to the feedback I received from everyone
in the class, I worked to model my answers more like those and I think it finally clicked in my
brain (a threshold concept!).

2. TPC Threshold Concepts

The first threshold concept that I discussed was genre. This was a threshold concept for me just
because it was a radically different way of thinking about business writing than I had been
taught (admittedly, undergraduate English majors are not overly focused on business and
professional writing). However, understanding the main parts of this concept came fairly easily
to me, so I would say that I have fully assimilated this concept into my knowledge of writing. As
for heuristics, this concept has been a little more slippery for me. For some reason, my brain
has not wanted to hold on to the definition of it, and it’s probably in the last few weeks that I
have really started to understand what the word is and what it describes. However, I can tell
that the concept of a heuristic will likely be something that I will have to reckon with again and
again throughout my time in this program. It will take many more examples of what a heuristic
is and possibly creating my own that will allow me to fully incorporate the information into my
worldview and be able to discuss it effectively.