Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Dear David,

Throughout this semester I have learned about myself as a writer. English Writing class was a remarkable learning experience. Steph certainly made it more interesting too! Steph taught the class not only how to write grammatically correct sentences, but how to create meaning in those sentences. I have learned to write about my feelings and emotions. I appreciate my writing now. The writing of others has also been a tremendous influence in my own writing. The course wiki was a major tool we have used this semester. I must admit that I despise the wiki with a burning passion, mostly because I could not figure out how to use it. Putting my hatred aside for a moment, I also must admit that the wiki was incredibly helpful. Once the wiki-team worked their magic, our wiki page and I became much friendlier. Everything has been organized and structured in a sensible fashion. The addition of cartoons, user pictures, and a little bit of animation made the page appealing to the eye. The core purpose of the wiki is to communicate. Our class has been having one large conversation via the wiki page all semester. Sharing our writing, thoughts, and ideas has been extremely valuable. There is an amazing quantity of information available on the wiki page, every bit of it contributed by members of the class and Steph. There is a great deal to be learned from others. In my opinion, I learned more about writing from the wiki than both of the textbooks combined. I am astounded by the amount of work that was put into the creation of the class magazine. It came out great! It is very similar to the wiki, yet the magazine has a more formal appearance. It is significant to realize that everyone in the class has produced multiple papers that merit publication. I noticed a couple of minor edits in my unit two paper. I originally had used an in-text citation for my reference to Imagine by John Lennon. This was arranged into a “Works Cited” section at the end of the document. It is an understandable alteration. I also happened to notice that an accent mark was added to Anzaldua’s name. It then occurred to me that I had not included the proper accent marks in the Portuguese phrases I had used throughout my paper. While this difference may seem miniscule to an English-speaker, if a Portuguese-speaker were to read this paper it would catch their eye immediately. The reason I neglected to insert the accents was only because I had no idea how to do so. Overall though, I do not feel as though my work was altered in any significant way that changed the central meaning of it. Bringing these two tools together (the wiki and the class magazine) there are considerable differences between the way my writing is presented in both. The wiki, being less formal, certainly does not invoke feelings of pride in my work. The magazine, being in formal print, represents the honor and pride of receiving publication. The wiki on the other hand gives a sense of privacy to the author. The use of a confidential alias provides an environment where everyone is able to speak freely and without reservation. This has its pros and cons in itself, but because of this it generates more material than the magazine. The magazine is not private. The true identity of the author is given and along with that the opinions and writings of the author. These differences were discussed in detail early on in the semester. That being said, what does all this have to do with metacommunication? Which tool gives a more specific example of metacommunication? What the hell does metacommunication mean? Well for starters metacommunication is essentially communicating about communication. Having a conversation about the class wiki sound familiar? At the beginning of the year the class spent a period of time discussing communication and the exchange of ideas on the wiki page. We have been using metacommunicative methods since the very beginning. The wiki is basically one main conversation about our writings and thoughts on the course. We have all been sharing our ideas on the wiki about the wiki and the uses of the wiki. The wiki promotes metacommunication. I have learned styles of writing towards a particular audience by means of the class wiki discussions. In a sense, this entire class has been based on the principle of learn how to communicate through writing via communication on the wiki. In other words, we have been learning about the writing process through metacommunicative practices. Or better yet, we learn to write through each other. My writing has shown great improvement throughout the semester. Reviewing my past reflection letters the main themes that stand out are organizational difficulties and focusing on a particular claim. Considering the thoughts of the class, it appears that most had difficulties with these tasks. I have the tendency to write down all of my thoughts as they come to me, rarely organizing them into a logical order on the first try. It often takes a large amount of paper for a final draft to emerge! This ties in with the claim overload problem. With an unorganized stream of thought on paper, the result is too many claims to sort out. Another trend in my writing has been improper diction. I frequently use contractions instead of properly writing the word out. Another bad habit I find myself getting into is an overuse of the comma. I am certain that I have completely worn out the comma button on my keyboard! I tend to add unnecessary commas into every other sentence. Other grammatical distractions that got in my way at the beginning of the year are no longer a problem now. Learning how to learn. Communicating about communication. Writing about our writing. Overcoming challenges, voicing our opinions, discovering ourselves, and applying research to reason are just some of the things we have accomplished this semester. I have learned about myself as a writer, myself as a student, and myself as…well, myself. Finally, after we have all gone through this journey of freshman College Writing, we can piece it all together.

Boa sorte!

Dave