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Ptah-Raet Craig

English 015 - Rhetoric & Composition

Professor Zack De Piero

December 4th, 2018

Metacognitive Reflection

Let’s be honest, high school English was not my forte. I currently am an

Aerospace Engineering major—that should tell you my preferred subject. Now with that

being said, I could also argue that I tend to do well in English. For me personally, my

previous English instructors seemed to have difficulty in keeping me engaged and

interested an entire school year. However, I knew this semester was going to be a good

one when I got a random email a week before my first day of college from some guy

named Zack. He had different conventions from my past English teachers, so I was

excited to attend his class after reading his email of background and expectations. I am

used to English teachers being older, soft-spoken, dry, having a peculiar style, and/or

proper, and formal. Those were the conventions I was used to—but Zack, he was fun,

exciting, and relatable. He knew his audience and how to engage with us; the entire

semester was built off of online work.

In the beginning of the semester, we constantly had assigned readings. Thankfully,

I chose to actually read those assignments—seeing as though they would guide me

through my semester. One reading that stood out to me was Graff’s So What? Who

Cares? I chose to quote him in my WP1 essay: “Graff points out methods of authors

when giving the reader the purpose, of who cares? He lists ways a writer should be
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pulling a reader in, ‘To gain greater authority as a writer, it can help to name specific

people or groups who have a stake in your claims and to go into some detail about their

views’ (Graff 95)” (Craig 4). He made me look at writing differently. I now am

motivated to write with a clear purpose, enough purpose that the reader will care.

I also remember when I was first introduced to genre and rhetoric. In the assigned

reading by Laura Carroll Backpacks to Briefcases: Steps Toward rhetorical Analysis. The

author mentions, “Understanding rhetorical messages is essential to help us become

better informed consumers, but it also helps evaluate the ethics of messages, how they

affect us personally, and how they affect society.” (46) This assigned reading helped me

better understand rhetorical messages in society. With that I was able to do my WP1

successfully.

Another important influence was our discussion of the different ways of thinking.

According to Peter Elbow’s definition, I am currently writing through first-order

thinking. This essay itself is more intuitive, rather than argument-based with controls and

constraints. When we write consciously, it then becomes second-order thinking. As I

write this, I have a general idea of what overall outcome I want, but everything is just

free writing.

With that being said, we can address what I did pull from this writing class. So as I

mentioned before, I am an Aerospace Engineering major. I am highly interested in doing

an ACURA research project under one of the engineering professors. I originally was

looking into ACURA on my own time, and then one day I walked into class and noticed

WP2 on the lesson plan. As luck would have it, it involved ACURA research. I could not
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be more excited to get a start on WP2. Zach wanted us to start by learning what ACURA

is and what it involved.

For those not familiar, ACURA stands for Abington College Undergraduate

Research Activities. It is an opportunity for students to work under a professor related to

their major, and who can help them pursue a research question. That’s not even the best

part—WP2 was a presentation not a paper. Public speaking is one of my fortes, so I was

excited to shift away from producing another paper, especially after scoring a 70 on my

WP1. This assignment allowed me to get familiar with the professor I wanted to work

under and review his previous work. Within that presentation, we had to take the things

we learned from WP1, and put them into WP2. After completing WP1 and thinking I

hated it, WP2 was my chance to make a comeback. In the end I was able to score an

11/10 on my WP2, because of the way Zack taught, i.e. he knew how to integrate

assignments in the beginning that would be the building blocks for assignments down the

line. So even if someone did not score their best on one assignment, knowing how to take

pieces of their previous work and putting them into the next one, a student can still

manage to be successful in his class.

This E-Portfolio is a prime example of how everything a students in Zack’s class

will build on the next assignment you do. If I switch over to WP3, an annotated

bibliography and outreach email—yes it sounds like a lot—if I did what was required in

WP2, then WP3 was a piece of cake. The style of this English class is well structured. For

example, Charles Bazerman paper on A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The
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Conversation Model, he makes a few suggestions on teaching rhetorical writing. He

writes:

“By establishing the importance of the voice of the writer and the authority

of personal perception, we have learned to give weight to what the student wants

to say, to be patient with the complex process of writing, to offer sympathetic

advice on how to rather than what not to, and to help the student discover the

personal motivations to learn to write.” (Bazerman 657)

I definitely feel as though this method helped me through this semester. Even

when I was wrong, I never felt like I was wrong. I just felt like I should think, “how it can

I improve my original work?” That mindset got me through this course with much ease.

I was able to walk away from English 15 and actually see that I learned new words

and concepts. Genre and rhetoric now means something to me, and this knowledge helps

me with how I see textual genre. Previous assignments have prepared me for times when

opportunities will presented themselves, like proposing an ACURA project to one of my

professors. I know where I should include annotated bibliographies in real life situations.

Furthermore, I am clear on what a good quality email looks like and how it can impact a

reader’s decision to consider what you ask of them. This course showed me a new side of

English—especially how to use dashes—and I am thankful for that.

Works Cited

Carroll, Laura. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1. Parlor Press, 2010.
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Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. New York:

Oxford U Press. 1986.

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. "They Say / I Say": the Moves That Matter in

Academic Writing. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Bazerman, Charles. “A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational

Model.” College English, vol. 41, no. 6, 1980, p. 656., doi:10.2307/375913.

My WP1