Assignment

Write a short, autobiographical essay that presents a chapter in your history as a writer. Include information about your other college writing courses (Core, a previous Writing 2, Writing 20, or any of the Writing 20 series) and other college writing instructors. Spend most of your time in this essay, then, following these instructions from Writing Analytically: Describe what you now take to be an especially formative experience in how you came to be the writer you are today. What practices and ideas has this experience or set of related experiences led to? This narrative offers a good way to begin exploring your ways of thinking about writing and about yourself as a writer. The early lessons we take in about writing--sometimes accidentally--affect many of us more than we recognize.

Questions to Guide Your Metacognitive Writing

Evidence: What kind of evidence did you use? Tell me about how you decided to use the information you used:

Analysis: How did you avoid counterproductive habits of mind? What techniques (5 analytical moves; notice and focus; freewriting; so what in a chain?) suggested in either of the textbooks did you use to discover and develop your thinking?

Organization: what idea(s) or organizing principle or binary suggested the order of your narrative?

Style: What about the style of the prose? How did you think about vocabulary? And level of formality?