Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Keeping an Online Journal

I haven't really been a huge fan of doing the reading journals online. I know that there are advantages to being able to read and comment on what my classmates have been observing in the novels, but I've found that in this class (as in English classes that I've taken in the past), there are discussions about the books that we're reading occurring out of class.

I really liked being able to keep a written journal; when I was writing in that, I found that I was thinking more about the content of what I was writing and it was much more personal. I would include a lot more tangents, anecdotes, and doodles that I have trouble incorporating into my online journal. I feel like when I'm writing something (especially when I know that anyone can read it) I try to make it a lot more polished and I end up taking a lot longer to think of something to write about. In previous journals, after doing that day's reading, I would just write down whatever I was thinking about, even if it wasn't totally relevant. I had a lot of fun doing that kind of writing, and I know that keeping a written journal has been an option, but I would always feel guilty because if I had enough free time to do that, I felt like I should be working on my online journal or an upcoming paper instead.

I don't know that getting rid of the online journals altogether would be a good idea, because I think that some people have definitely benefited from them, but I wasn't really a huge fan of them.

1 comment:

Mitchell said...

Thanks for your thoughts. I realize (and have had second-hand evidence on occasion) that y'all talk about these books outside of class, but in terms of the journal serving as an extension of your participation in class (which is a portion of your credit for the course), this way I can be privy to these conversations! (Of course, you could always pass around your notebooks for each other to comment on, too--that never occurred to me before . . .)