Reflecting a Reflection

Bruce Urbanik, a student, wrote "A Comprehensive Reflective Letter." This short letter was a reflection of how his opinion and skills as a writer has changed. In this letter he writes about his downfalls and insecurities of writing and how he has made them into strengths. Near the end of the letter Urbanik writes that he found a disk with old writing assignments on it and how his writing has improved since he has written those papers.

When writing a reflective letter there are four kinds of writers knowledge which include: self-knowledge, content-knowledge, rhetorical-knowledge, critical knowledge or judgment. Self-knowledge is the understanding of how you are doing as a writer. Content-knowledge is what you have learned by writing and various subjects. Rhetorical-knowledge focuses on your awareness of your rhetorical decisions. Finally, critical-knowledge or judgment concerns your awareness of significant strengths and weaknesses in your writing. Urbanik's letter does a decent job of presenting his knowledge in each of these fields, but I would like to see him go into more details and state some specific strengths and weaknesses.

Along with the different types of knowledge a writers ought to ask himself many questions, questions that a reader may ask. Questions that Urbanik seems to overlook are ones that have to do with his own opinion of his work. He does not address questions on how he believes his essay turns out, but broadly says he improved over the years. Urbanik could make stronger points by explaining the difficulty of each assignment and telling how successful he was in writing each assignment. Urbanik could have been more text-specific when he was talking about his "biggest downfall," which was timed essays, and use examples of how this is his worst style of writing.

Urbanik writes a pretty strong reflection letter. He could revisit some of the writer's knowledge questions so that he can answer questions that will be asked by the reader before they are even asked.

Jordan Engel