THLOG 4

Fourth week of the quarter and things seemed to be going super fast. This week in class we mostly went over various tips and strategies to better our writing. One of the new tips we covered was ‘poemifying’ our paragraphs in order to see the structure better. By separating the sentences, you could see the length better. When I first did it I felt like my sentence structure sucked because I had these HUGE sentences then I would have these short sentences right next to it. But as Zack mentioned, the variation adds flow to the paragraph and makes it less boring and monotone. Another practice that we did to better our writing was the highlighter activity. If I’m being honest at first I thought this activity was really dumb but after words when I got home and took it seriously, it genuinely helped me in revising my WP1. By using the separate colors for everything, it let me see where I had most my evidence in the paper and if I had my analysis where it needed to be. Although I felt I did sort of a good job with the separation of the sources, my analysis was really lacking what it should have been. This activity also helped me find a balance between direct evidence and any extra evidence. On Wednesday, I really enjoyed the Mark Smith murder activity. We’ve been spending so much time learning about genre and at times it sort of just feels like it’s an academic thing and I’m never going to actually use it in real life. Through this activity however it helped me see how with just a few pieces of information, you can frame a story using genres and conventions. Always taking things back to psychology lol, genres to me are starting to seem like schemas that I learned about in psychology 104, introduction to personality. These schemas are sort of a reference guide that helps you remember and define things more accurately. As with genres, each schema is dependent on the framework so you have one for family, one for friends, and one for tv shows and so on. And just like genres, when using a specific schema the ‘conventions’ or your actions/thoughts/words will vary with the topic.