You are engaged today in metacognition, and I need you to take a moment to consider the term itself. Look at the etymology of the prefix; it suggests change and higher-order thought as much as anything else. Look, too, at this post, which was quite literally the second post of the year. Reflection is not the same as metacognition; they are related, one plays off the other, but they are not synonymous. Read that post again:
While we often use them this way, the words metacognition and reflection are not exactly interchangeable. A quick trip to Wikipedia (although she is a capricious fount of knowledge) reveals a bit more about the differences, viz.
- that metacognition is thinking about thinking, while
- self-reflection is a more general (and somewhat existential) kind of introspection.
You will engage in metacognition and reflection after almost every writing assignment in this course. We might even say that reflection is the first step toward metacognition, and that you are asked to take that step over and over again. The reason is simple: You become better readers, writers, and thinkers when you understand how you read, write, and think; and to inculcate that reflex takes significant time in and out of class.
I will continue to hyperlink particular terms, by the way, because we will, at some point, gambol through an updated version of this mini-unit on language, and I have my own collection of best-loved words, among them inculcate and capricious and, more recently, desultory and deleterious.
Whatever we call the processes, you are reading your own work, thinking about it, and then writing. The problem: You (the collective, general, historical you) don’t always write in a way that helps.
At this point in the year, I should be able to tell you, simply and without exhaustive instruction, to reflect on and to be metacognitive about your exam scores; you should, at this point in the year, know what the foundational terms of our course imply. You are writing about your thinking as you consider those numbers, unpacking weaknesses and strengths as a reflection of that thinking, and then developing strategies for the high-stakes test you take in two weeks as a consequence of thinking that you have revised. This is about the choices you make when you think, the ways in which you process and understand and synthesize information, the nascent sense you have of the machinery thrumming away in your mind.
This metacognition is due Monday now, not Friday. Take the time to do it well, so that it means something to your test preparations. Obviously I do not wish for this to be a test-driven moment in your lives; since the test isn’t going anywhere, however, prepare for it you must. While you are considering the rhetorical analysis portions of this midterm, especially the relationship between good reading on the multiple-choice section and rhetorical analysis, visit this site:
And while you are there, find and memorize to some degree this introduction from Harris:
Practice these; try them out. Do not worry if they sometimes ring false at first. Play with them–learn to manipulate and control your words and ideas–and eventually you will master the art of aggressive instruction: keeping the reader focused with anaphora, emphasizing a point with an expletive, explaining to him with a metaphor or simile, organizing your work in his mind with metabasis, answering his queries with hypophora or procatalepsis, balancing possibilities with antithesis. You will also have gone a long way toward fulfilling the four requirements mentioned at the beginning: the devices of decoration and variety will help make your reader pay attention, the devices of organization and clarification will help him understand your points, the devices of association and some like procatalepsis will help him believe you, and the devices of emphasis, association, beauty, and organization will help him remember.
Make this kind of assignment work for you. Earn some college credit, yes, but also learn how to transform every test you take into a course in self-study.
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