Thlog #4

Going back and reading Journal 4.2 I thought about why the class was labeling questions the way they did. It is pretty clear what people thought were STEM major questions versus the Sociology/Communication majors. This is kind of like the Genre activity; there are conventions to how majors think that is reflected in their questions. Person #4 questions were similar to many other peoples, but they were the one person to be classified as History/English. This intrigued me so I kept reading their response to figure out what “gave away” their major. I realized that it was their style of writing, their answer being written in complete sentences and in a paragraph structure, which lead the person to think they were English major. This stood out to me because I thought it was interesting that someone made a judgment about someone, not from their content, but from its form and style.

Analyzing decisions people make is actually something I do more often than I should; this is why these activities are so interesting to me. I do it because I like to reason, I want to create reasons for everything. Don’t ask me why, but I have always been an “overthinker” (even though I don’t think that is a real thing). I enjoy thinking about the cause and effects of pretty much everything, which is very similar to rhetoric. I just didn’t know that it had a name or an academic purpose. I think that my habits are a little excessive but this class is making me feel a less crazy because it has shown me that this is just another way of thinking. Writing about this stuff is making me a better writer because it has taken away the fear that I am writing about the wrong stuff so now I can focus on the writing itself.