Reading Journal – Since one goal of the course is to increase your awareness of your role as actants in and observers of the world around you, you will write weekly reflective pieces on assigned readings, reminiscent of a journal entry. These personal response papers are intended to be informal contemplations that nonetheless demonstrate an active engagement with the literature. We’ll be reading works by well-known American nature writers. Most of the work will be non-fiction, and an important tool for many of these writers was keeping a journal. Thoreau’s Walden was based on his meticulous field notes and journal. The personal element, the filtering of experience through an individual sensibility, is strong in this tradition. Your journal should be a combination of class notes and responses to the readings, and even lectures. Each entry should be about a page in length--maximum two pages (double spaced). Before we meet for class, make notes in your text, which will be helpful in discussion. During lectures and discussion, make more notes. (As you can see, I strongly recommend note-taking.) After our class, write out your fuller thoughts. 

Purpose: You are learning to take detailed notes, which will be useful in writing the final paper, and you are thinking often about what these texts mean to you. Most of the authors we read kept journals (parts of which we may read) and wrote letters, to develop their thoughts and powers of expression. The best part of writing a journal is that it sustains your personal growth. (It also verifies that you've done the reading, thought about it, and don't need quizzes to test that knowledge.) Your reading journal is your initial contribution to class discussion. In discussion, you are expected to go beyond those points, listen to others, and develop fresh ideas. The journal entry is not a substitute for talking and listening well.

Content of Entries: Show your knowledge of the reading, from beginning to end, both in large concepts and specific details. Your entries need not be a polished final product. The prose should be informal but clear. It's OK to write in the first person, to use contractions, and to invoke images to describe ideas. The writing does not need to be "creative," just the level you might expect in a good letter or memo. It should be writing, not "talk" because speech is often slangy, disconnected, and simplistic in vocabulary. Use your “Field Guide” for hints as to the content of entries (when it arrives). Or, check out prompts for journal entries.

Criteria for assessment: Each log will be graded according to how successfully it: 1) exhibits a clear point of view about the reading(s) that opens up discussion of key issues raised by the text(s); 2) uses evidence to support that point of view; 3) provides fresh, keen insight into the works; 4) demonstrates an understanding the reading material due at the submission time.  Each log will receive a grade of 10 (strong), 9-8 (good-acceptable), 7-6 (fair-poor) or no credit. Here are some terms that come up when grading:

thoughtful, wide-ranging
full of good evidence
sound reasoning
clear, direct writing
lively, quirky, spunky
sharp particulars that help to picture and frame ideas
concrete specifics that anchor ideas, stir inward vision
vague, undetailed, generalized
slapdash, casual
thin, sparse, flat

A good journal has a sense of movement. Each entry is a journey (journal) in which you discover and explore the landscape of a text, attend to what its writer is saying and then to how you respond to that. Use passages, images, scenes. Don't over-generalize or totalize (none of that stuff about "man" and "society"). Pay thoughtful attention to particulars and what you see or feel in them. Try to analyze and not just describe. Here’s a sample (though not perfect, perhaps too structured and I don’t see the “fear tactics, but tries to analyze the rhetorical choices she made about purpose, audience, diction, tone) on Silko’s essay.

Remember that the path of learning in a journal is inductive. In deduction, you announce a thesis and prove it with evidence--as in a classic 5-page paper. In induction, you observe, question, analyze, and then at the end, generalize. It's a process of discussion that is organic, growing by accumulation and accretion, and rather like the mind itself.

Though you should write in the journal each week, I will probably collect entries every other week at (to be announced). Keep them together, as at the end of class you will submit all of them as a kind of portfolio/complete reading journal.

At least once during the semester we will meet and conference on how you are progressing and set goals for the rest of the semester.

Please type entries so that they are 1) easy to read, and 2) easy to retrieve in case I ask you to revise.