Journaling

Go to any college and enter any basic writing course. What you will find in nearly every one is a requirement that students submit journals. Often, these journals have predefined subjects and due dates, though sometimes one or the other are more lax. It makes me wonder how the practice became so pervasive. I also require journals, though—as should not be a surprise—I require nothing like subjects nor due dates.

Journaling has the obvious benefit of requiring students to write. The basic premise is that if you give students the opportunity to write something that falls outside the domain of the big, scary writing assignment, you will get more natural writing. Plus it gives the instructor the chance to give grades on smaller assignments.

However, there are added benefits that instructors may not be thinking of when they design a course to include journals. Like I mention in my previous post, it is always beneficial to write every day. Even if you’re writing the most horrible crap you have ever written, you will still benefit from writing every day. What it does is gets you into the practice of writing, of thinking in prose, so that you are more able to act on it when you are writing for serious.

As is commonly noted, practice makes perfect. It’s simply a matter of muscle memory, really. Writing with the hand or with the keyboard over and over and over will make the act more natural as you do it more. Suddenly you begin to associate that feeling of a pen against the paper or your fingers on the keys with creating words, sentences, paragraphs.

I don’t require subjects. This is actually frustrating for my students. However, it opens them up to having to think of things themselves. It is not uncommon for instructors to offer very open assignments that students will not know how to approach. This will give them the opportunity to experience coming up with ideas to write about when they have no parameters at all. My hope is that they will come to develop the skills of taking confidence in making a choice as a student. Sometimes those choices will be wrong, but it is better to do something with confidence and be wrong than to do something halfway that might be right.

I also do not require due dates. The idea here is that it requires my students to take responsibility for their work. Certainly, they can put off doing any journals until the end of the semester when they are all finally due. However, they will come to find that cramming them at the end of the semester, when they have a final paper to turn in and final work for other classes, to be very difficult to accomplish. Those students who have been turning in journals all semester will see great rewards in finishing work early.

My goal as a teacher is to prepare students for what they will face in the future. I do my best to design assignments in a way that challenges them to develop new skills and new strategies to meet the demands they may encounter as they continue in their academic and professional careers.

If nothing else, journals give me the chance to comment on their writing outside of their major assignments, so they have a better chance of succeeding when they begin writing them.