Thlog #1 - Nerdy and Cheesy

The last thing I expected to get out of writing in the first week was that I'd actually enjoy the class. I've always had a love/hate relationship with writing, it's gotten me through some of the worst times and been the reason behind some of the worst times. Nonetheless, two classes into this course and it’s what I look forward to Monday’s and Wednesday’s. This first week in Writing 2 we’ve covered a considerable amount of thing’s already. Zack’s opened my eyes to a whole new meaning of the word genre and what it entails. I used to think there was just the basics and then sub genre’s within them, like horror; drama; romance; comedy; you know Netflix movie genres. There’s all kinds of other genres that don’t just apply to the theme of what you’re writing, reading, watching, or listening to. Get this...every piece of writing belongs to a genre OF THAT WRITING! Kind of confusing I know, but basically from tweets to school essays to the texts on your cell phone, those are all actually genres of writing. I think that’s really cool though, it makes everything you write or read unique. Another thing about genre’s we touched base on is that not every genre has all the conventions of that specific genre, which makes sense. Not every text message you receive is like the average text but that doesn’t mean it’s not a text message. The other subject we started working on was “1st order thinking” and “2nd order thinking.” 1st order thinking is like free writing a little bit, it’s letting the words flow and just writing for YOU. 2nd order thinking is when you formulate and edit your thoughts, and it’s a more formal type of writing. This was the most useful thing I’ve done in class since I started college. Truth time here: I’m kind of a crummy writer. I write using 1st order thinking sometimes, sometimes I write using 2nd order thinking, and it’s all based on how I feel like writing when I do it. So when we learned what exactly those kinds of “thinkings” are, when to use which, and how they affect can your writing process and writing itself I was a little ecstatic. I can see these topics, along with the other things we’ll learn in the next couple months being very beneficial to not only my writing in this class, but my writing in the rest of my academic career and life.