Thlog #4

This week we started looking at WP2 and talked about how people in different majors can think of and understand the same event or concept in different ways. For the journal on Wednesday, we had to write down some questions we could ask based on a scenario of walking down the beach and seeing a bonfire with a half-melted bottle next to it. I thought it was very interesting to see what kinds of questions people asked because I had not even thought of asking some of the ones that other people did. For example, student 13 asked "How hot does the fire have to be to melt the glass?" This is a very scientific-type question, so it does not surprise me that the majors people guessed for this person were chemistry, biology, biological anthropology, and bio-psychology.

We also looked at what elements go into writing a paper by thinking of it as a lab dissection. I found that categorizing what is necessary to have in a paper into higher-order and lower-order concerns makes it easier to ensure that you have taken care of all of these necessities because once the higher-order concerns have been dealt with, the lower-order ones should follow.

I enjoyed the activity we did with the murder scenario because it helped me to see how different people writing in different genres affect how the same information can be communicated. I thought it was interesting that even between similar genres, such as a two news reports, the style and the content of the pieces were very different. The local news report was a lot more personal and involved more details about the victim and his family, whereas the national news report looked at how this specific murder happened and how it affects people on a national level.