General Journal

Purpose
The main reason for keeping a journal is to develop the practice of reflecting-in-writing. Writing is an important component of thinking. Unless you express your thoughts in some more or less concrete way, your thoughts are incomplete. We sort, clarify, revise, and preserve our thoughts via writing.

Sometimes writing a formal paper produces tension that creates a cycle of bad writing. Keeping a journal is one way to break that cycle because many of the tension-producing elements of writing are eliminated.

Possible Topics
Ideally, the journal should be a place where you write regularly, safely, for relatively brief periods of time about matters pertinent to your class:

• You could explore your responses to the things you read, to class lectures, activities, and discussions.
• You could record observations, ideas, and questions about your experiences with communication interactions outside of class.
• You could also develop a source book of ideas, sketches, rough drafts, notes and so forth for use in your more formal writing assignments.
  Your professor might give you directed writings or specific questions or topics to think about, but you will usually be asked to include nondirected writings as well. Thus, you need to journal on your own.

Frequency
You should develop the habit of journaling regularly and thus learn that writing need not be quite as painful as it often seems. A good rule-of-thumb would be to develop the habit of writing in the journal at 3-4 days per week. Some of your entries may be rather brief, but others may be several pages in length. Some days you may only write for 10-15 minutes; other days you might write for an hour or more. The most important idea is to keep at it. In this sense, keeping the journal means that you discipline yourself to maintain a regular, ongoing record of your thoughts and observations.

Other Details
Each professor will have his or her own guidelines, but here are some general points:

• You probably should not journal on a computer, but rather in journaling book (separate from your class notes and/or folder).
• Write in ink. Do not erase mistakes, just cross them out.
  Do not write rough drafts of your journal entries.
  Note the date and time of each entry.
• Try to develop the habit of keeping regular appointments with your journal. It will be more productive if you write regularly for shorter periods of time, rather than irregularly for longer periods of time.
• Feel free to add pictures, diagrams, and charts, adding a kind of scrapbook flair.

If you find yourself struggling to put sentences together, then brainstorm; use modified outlines, laundry lists, top-ten lists, or anything that might get your mind going. You can also experiment with how your write; adopt a character or persona, send yourself a letter or postcard, record your dreams or fantasies (well, nothing naughty). You can go back to previous entries and rewrite them, add to them, or develop them in some way. In short, try to cultivate the habit of building on previous thoughts/entries, rather than trying to make each one totally original; this is all about synthesis.