Metacognition: Orlando Essay

One of the hardest essays I have had to write, up until that point in time at least, was the Orlando essay. Being one who loves structured and direction, I struggled with the synthesis of ideas and putting them down on a piece of paper. I usually don't have this problem, but I can now recall some flaws in my thinking that made my writing process more difficult.

The Denial
All too often, I find myself not believing or disliking that I have to do something difficult. In some convoluted way, I attach a stigma to the task at hand, which causes me to go into the process with a "glass half empty" sort of mindset. This certainly proved itself most when writing the first draft of this essay. I didn't feel like I had a very strong or clever idea in the first place, so I was even more reluctant to sit down in front of the keyboard.

The Communication
It was still relatively early in the year, and I didn't quite feel the level of comfort with asking questions as I do now. With that being said, a correction to the completion of e assignment, which mostly would have cleared up the blurriness of the whole things, would just have been to ask my teacher a question a two about my idea and layout fro the essay in its preliminary stages.

The Idea Itself
In relation to the communication disconnect, the development of the idea was also a contributing factor to the paper's lack of success. I believe that I should have delved deeper into the text and messages of the story in order to find a better claim. The claim should have been an idea that was present throughout the entire story, not just a symbol at the end of the book that I had to stretch too thin to fit my paper, not my paper fit it.

What I did like about my idea was that it was original and that it did connect to a symbol at the end of the book which other classmates of mine had many questions about. In a perfect world, I would have been able to start from scratch and use a new claim entirely. To begin with, I thought it was clever, but what I would change (given my stage in the writing process at the time of the writing process) is my support for my claim. I don't think that the support was entirely relevant, so I think that with some more time, communication, and a little bit less denial, my essay could have turned out better than it did and more how I envisioned it.