thlog?

Week 1

The first week of a new quarter is always hectic no matter which courses I chose to take.  Writing 2 is no different. I never considered myself a great writer so if I’m being honest, it’s safe to say I was not looking forward to this class. However now that I am reflecting on what we’ve covered so far, and peeked into the reader on what we will cover in these next 9 weeks, I realize that this class is not only necessary for success in my academic world, but in the professional and personal worlds as well.

The reading we did in class, 2 kinds of thinking (elbow), was really interesting in my opinion and genuinely captured my attention. In the reading, Elbow talked about first order and second order thinking and how each are essential in personal, professional, and academic writing. For first order thinking, the class described it as ’word vomiting, brainstorming, talking out loud, and exploring’. Personally, being a psychology student, I related first order thinking to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of free association in which he made his patients bounce ideas off of themselves in order to unveil their authentic thoughts and feelings. Like free associating, first order thinking gives you un-edited raw material that is free of outside biases, inputs, and judgments. Second order thinking on the other hand was described by the class as ‘analyzing, clarifying, and deconstruction’. Going along with the class, I also saw second order thinking as contentious proofreading, or being careful of your surroundings. Again relating everything in my life to psychology theories, I compared second order thinking to the mental schemas which according to social psychologists, everybody has. With schemas, everything that you do, say, or feels is always dependent on the setting you’re currently in. As with second order thinking, depending on who you want to communicate your first order thinking ideas to is going to affect your second order thinking and how you relay the message. For example, if you wanted to greet somebody, your first order thinking would automatically most likely go directly to “hi”. However, with second order thinking, if you were talking to a professor you’d say something along the line of “hello, good evening” ect. Rather than to a friend where you could say “yo wassup” or something along those lines. 

Along with the readings, we also focused on genres a lot which I feel like I have a pretty good grasps of after all the examples we’ve gone through.