Reading and Writing Journals: Balancing Skills and Humanities in the English Classroom

Interdepartmental rivalries between literature instruction and composition instruction have contributed to viewing reading and writing as disconnected activities. One solution to this divisiveness is a course in "the journal as a literary tradition," which combines reading and writing in equal portions. Students first learn about the background of journal-writing, and journal devices and techniques. They begin keeping their own journals in the second week of the course, writing five times a week, in addition to completing journal exercises such as writing in a descriptive or cathartic form. Students also begin to read published journals, such as Anne Frank's. Journals are handed in at the end of seven weeks, along with a four-page paper discussing a particular phase of their lives or an event through which they discovered some truth about themselves, another person, or some aspect of life. The second seven weeks are devoted to the academic journal, wherein students see their writing as a tool for original thought about their studies. They form proposals for their journals and read published journals and related novels or essays, such as Virginia Woolf's journal and her essay "A Room of One's Own." Students turn in a final paper analyzing a professional journal, and throughout the course are allowed to share selections of their own journals with the class. They emerge from the course understanding that journals are not merely repositories of others' ideas, but are a way of thinking and learning. (JC)