Hi everyone!

In this week's reading of Reflective Writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking? , author Sandra L. Giles discusses an author's development of self-reflection, as well as its benefits for the author's writing. The article debriefs that the benefits of reflection are that it "helps you to develop your intentions (purpose), figure out your relation to your audience, uncover possible problems with your individual writing processes, set goals for revision, make decisions about language and style, and the list goes on" (4). Generally, this process appears to allow the author to look at their writing in a more objective and general sense, as a reader does when they read another author's writing. In last week's blog post the reading discussed how when our writing is read, the readers don't focus on each sentence, but rather evaluate the reading as a whole. The reflection process allows for us to do that to our own writing. Furthermore, this allows us to identify problems firsthand, and give us the ability to "develop more insight into and control over composing and revising processes" (4). By pulling ourselves away from our writing and viewing it in a more objective sense, this calls for practicing good metacognition. In my AP Psychology class in high school our first assignment was to understand metacognition, as it would help us be successful in the class. In this context, metacognition means how well we can assess how prepared we are without believing we understand more than we really do. It sounds confusing, but it generally means how well we can assess ourselves and our thinking, and acknowledge problems that need to be addressed in our writing. I added some memes about metacognition to the left. Moreover, I've added a flowchart of the reflective process which illustrates why metacognition is so important in self-reflection. If we can't understand how we're thinking, it's hard to point out problems in our writing that can be acted on to better our work.