Thlog numero uno

This first week in writing 2 has been fun, as we learned about different genres in writing.  Several textual genres are letter of recommendation requests, resumes, syllabuses, and job applications. They each have unique conventions and are written for a certain audience.  I really enjoyed going over different conventions in types of genre, such as in the country music and the horror movie scenes we went over in class.  Conventions were found by listing the elements of the type of movie or music, so that one would know that the horror movie was being watched or that country music was being played.  For example, what makes a horror movie a horror movie?  A convention describes what is considered “normal” in a certain genre.  

The reading that stood out to me the most was Chapter 3 of Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing.  From this reading that was done in class, I discovered the concepts of first order and second order thinking.  First order thinking is writing down what comes to mind and creating new ideas.  There is no real organization during this process, and it is used so that we will have a lot of new and interesting ideas and information to write about.  The second order thinking consists of structuring the flow of ideas we have and breaking it all down to create a piece of writing that all fits together.  This is where it is all analyzed and edited, and this is the “critical thinking” stage.  It is important to work on these two orders of thinking one at a time.  First just write stuff down and keep the pen moving, then when it starts to click analyze what is written down to make sure it is all written down logically.  I have never thought of doing my writing in this way.  Usually I just create an outline and fill it in with information, and so it is interesting to see how much my writing will improve using these methods.