Thlog 1

This week, in writing 2 we focused on genre. I thought that I knew what a genre was and how to pick out genres, but after this week’s lessons I now have an even deeper understanding. Genres are like moods; for example when you feel happy you can be happy for different reasons such as winning a baseball game or finding out that you have just won a scholarship. While in each scenario you feel happy there are different contributing factors that have made you happy, just like there are many different conventions that create a genre. Both winning a baseball game and winning a scholarship will make you happy, but for different reasons. Just like how the conventions of a superhero movie can include: a main character that doesn’t know his origin, police chases, or a bad guy that is friends with the hero. Yet all of these conventions do not need to be present for the movie to fit within the genre of a superhero movie.

We also learned about first and second order thinking. They are very different from each other, nevertheless they are both required for strong writing. First order thinking is the uncensored word-vomit that we start with and second order thinking is the conscious revision of this content. Used together they can be effective in writing. First order thinking should be used in writing a rough draft or outline, first order thinking is what gets the ball rolling and can is actually where a majority of your content and inspiration will come from. Second order thinking is a review of that content, an editing process. These are two different styles of writing; first order thinking is the fantastic writing and second order thinking is the rule-bound kind of writing that we have been talking about in class. When employed together the two thinking processes can create a great research paper, email, text message, movie script, novel, or any other writing genre.