so, Metacognition is the practice of thinking about thinking or identifying one’s cognitive process . in essence, metacognition is understanding how you prepare for academic challenges, exams, or tasks, and then being able to reflect on whether you did well, you prepared adequately, and what was most effective. in a writing setting, this type of self-awareness helps you transfer skills in writing, say, fanfiction into writing academically, competitively and professionally.
here’s an article from brown university on the subject i’ll discuss further. there are 3 parts of practicing metacognition identified in this article: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. how might this look like for a fanfic writer?
planning: asking oneself ‘what is my goal?’ ‘what strategies should i use to meet that goal?’ ‘how much time/length do i need to meet my goal?’. so maybe my goal is to write a meet cute where two characters kiss. i’ll need to use a perspective, an upbeat tone, and forward characterization to do this. it’ll probably take 5000 words and two days to write.
monitoring: asking oneself: is my story making sense? am i reaching my goal, or do i need to summarize more succinctly to keep it to 5k? maybe you started with a lot of exposition and now you’re 6k in and the characters haven’t met yet. what went wrong/changed? is it ok that it changed or did you not realize it got away from you? what now?
evaluation: asking oneself: did i reach my goal? was it effective? what would i change next time?
this is where comments come in
it is incredibly difficult to evaluate yourself. comments like “i love this!” actually do begin to touch on the evaluation step of metacognition. it means, in general, the writer is on the right track. comments like “i loved the dialogue between x and y” or “the emotions of this section really hit me” begin to answer the questions of was it effective, did i reach my goal and conversely answer what would i change next time (by adding more of whatever was specified as working well). HYPER SPECIFIC comments, like analyzing the story between the lines or pasting in a line that you really liked and explaining why, is like jet fuel for the metacognition process and i’m not exaggerating. specifically pointing out what was effective and why is incredibly useful
i can straight up credit my writing style to all of my friends and readers who have given incredibly detailed comments. when i found a community who gave feedback like that, my writing improved a thousand times faster than before. so! i guess what i’m saying is give feedback! it goes so much further than you realize!
