Writers journal

Background

Throughout the course, you will be asked to compose Writer’s Journals. These journals will serve a variety of purposes, but all of them will be useful to you in your work in this course and beyond. This first Writer’s Journal will help you to gather your thoughts about writing and literacies before we explore some core course concepts in depth.

Purpose

In this Writer’s Journal, you will describe what you know about writing – what is “writing” to you – and how you know it (how did you learn it). You will then take this articulated understanding and reflect on how it matches up with the nature of the course as you understand it so far.

Skills and Outcomes

Recalling and summarizing past writing experiences (Rhetorical Knowledge)
Comparing past writing knowledge/experiences with future expectations (Critical Thinking, Reading and Composing)
Habits of Mind Practiced

Creativity
Flexibility
Metacognition
Tasks

Your journal entry should describe what you believe the act of writing to be or do based on your experience.
Your entry should also discuss how you “learned” to write. As you think about what is central to “writing,” when/how did you learn this?
Finally, your journal entry should reflect on how your understanding of writing matches up with “writing” as the course has presented it so far.
Note: there are many different ways to approach these tasks, but you should aim to be as thorough as possible in your response (approximately 500 words is a good target length).

Criteria for Success

In each Writer’s Journal, you should:

clearly address each question or task;
employ many details, examples, and explanations in answering each question or task; and,
create an internally organized text, employing sentences (or notes where applicable) that clearly relate to one another.
Be sure to follow all the submission instructions carefully and to assess your journal immediately after you submit it.