Thlog Week 1

This first week, the overarching topic is that convention and rules are not the same. Different genres contain different conventions, but not every convention needs to be followed in order for something to be characterized under the branch of a certain genre. As someone who does not listen to country music, I found it difficult at first to describe what makes a country song a country song. I soon learned there were many, many, arguably endless, conventions that can describe country music. In fact, not only does something not need to follow all the conventions to be considered part of the genre, it can even break a few conventions. From Dirk’s reading about genres, I found it interesting when Dirk mentioned that the creation of a new genre stems when someone bases his or her response on a previous response. It was a new perspective that I had not previously thought of before. Genres do not simply form out of thin air but rather comes from repeating rhetorical situations, and as each audience’s response to the genre changes, the conventions within the genres change as well. The reading about first and second order thinking was also very interesting, as I had not previously thought about the different types of thinking. The most memorable idea that the author mentioned was that “thinking carefully means trying to examine your thinking while using it too—trying to think about thinking while also thinking about something else—which often leads people to foolishness” (Elbow 56). The key word that caught my attention in particular was “foolishness.” It made me reread the sentence a few times, and perhaps after thinking too carefully and examining my thinking while still thinking, I wondered if I had been led to foolishness…