Metacognitive Analysis

Omar Reyes

Professor Sean Pessin

English 114B

May 1, 2013

Metacognitive Analysis

Over the course of a few weeks I have had the chance to experience the making and updating of a blog. A blog is a website where one shares their opinions and ideas to a worldwide audience on a regular basis and they can be about pretty much everything you want it to be. The subject of my blog was something I do feel strongly about and it was guitar maintenance, along with a few summaries/analysis about the problem with the arts in public schools and how their budgets are being cut. Guitar playing is something I have held and still hold near and dear to my heart so I decided to make guitar care my main subject.  After I had gathered the sufficient amount of information about guitar care I was then told to write a “hybrid essay.” A hybrid essay is not an ordinary essay because it uses poems, pictures, and several other things that aid in the actual essay without the use of formal text. So, I decided to use pictures in my hybrid essay, and the subject was about how the parts of a guitar function like a human body. The various intricate parts are vital to each other as human organs are. I showed example of what the functions are and why they are important for a guitar to function properly. I emphasized the fact that if one part is not working then the whole guitar itself begins to fall apart, literally. The way I used the pictures was to show what the parts looked like and what some aspects of it represent, along with captioning under it to show why I put the picture there to begin with. I used many types of pictures such as, guitar designs, famous guitar players, logos, electronic schematics, and many guitar parts to show a reader how they look like without actually explaining the whole thing. I also provided examples of what a specific guitar part represents, for example in my essay I compared the electronics in the guitar body to a human brain. They are similar because it is where the main electrical components are and both are intricately designed to do various things for specific parts. Although the human brain is obviously a lot more intricate than the wiring of a guitar, it was just a small comparison between the two. Now again I really emphasized the fact that all the parts of a guitar are vital to each other like a human body’s. For example, the truss rod is like the back bone of a guitar because without it a guitar’s neck would warp, be out of balance, perform horribly, and would just “kill” the guitar. A guitar without a truss rod would affect various parts of a guitar like the neck, bridge, headstock, strings, and sometimes the body, like a human’s body would fail if it were missing a vital organ but it will affect other organs as the “organs” of a guitar affect each other. I concluded my essay by stating that one who is a dedicated guitar player should care for their guitar and run maintenance regularly to maintain all the parts in working order, which was the whole reason of my blog on guitar care. Overall this was a great learning experience because not only did I get to experience the making of a blog but I also learned many guitar care tips and tricks that I had never heard of before. I enjoyed sharing different pieces of information about guitar care whether people cared or not and I supplied enough information to get a newbie started in maintaining their guitar.