"A journal is a place for confusion and certainty, for the half-formed and the completed."
-- Ken Macrorie. Telling Writing Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1970, p.141.
"Through the journal one comes to know oneself better as a teacher, and in the discipline of keeping a journal the teacher can experience what students experience when they are told to write and do not really feel like it."
--Nancy Comley, "The Teaching Seminar: Writing Isn't Just Rhetoric." Training the New Teacher of College Composition. Ed. Charles W. Bridges. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1986. 47-58. 55.
Journals are a positive way to encourage self-expression. They can help students explore course content and tie it into personal experience or observations of everyday life. In short, journals serve as a means of writing to learn.
Journals may be kept in a notebook, a file, or an online folder, and they are distinguished by an informal nature, an intimate audience (often being addressed to the writer himself and no one else), and regularity of entries. Since the purpose of journals is to develop fluency and promote critical thinking, they should be used frequently. If your students can't make entries at least once a week, consider other methods of low-stakes writing.
Journals work best when students have a schedule to follow. Most instructors either give a set series of journal assignments or require regular entries. Collect them at regular intervals, perhaps once early in the term, once at mid-term, and once toward the end, so you can see how students are using them and provide useful feedback. Since journals are intended to provide writing practice, encourage writing in complete sentences rather than lists or fragments.
While some journals are completely personal and can address any topic, the most useful for "W" course purposes will be focused on course content and will include the instructor and peers as audience. Be sure that the students understand the difference between journals and diaries. Journal writing involves opinions and reactions while a diary is merely a record of events. A good way to demonstrate this point is to show excerpts from the journals of established writers like Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, or Nathaniel Hawthorne.
A caveat: don't ask students to be too personal in journals, or you may find yourself in some awkward situations. You do not want to have to comment on their most intimate thoughts or experiences, and you do not want to confuse teaching with counseling.
Begin with journal assignments that develop skills you want practiced, and provide sample journal entries. Demonstrate what sorts of questions, insights, or criticisms a sample reading might elicit. Be especially careful to define (operationally if possible) terms such as "close reading," "critical thinking," "insight," or "imagination." While you may simply ask students to respond to readings or class discussions in their journals, you may also want to provide a short list of prompts for them to use if they can't think of a subject. (See the suggested list below.)
Require that students give concrete evidence to support the opinions they give in their journals. This will help them learn to elaborate.
Responding to JournalsHowever, it is best to limit your responses to content. Do not feell compelled to evaluate entries for correct grammar or punctuation. If you want, you can write responses to the students' entries. Encourage them to think more deeply about the subject rather than focus on errors. The point of journals should be to foster fluency in writing; in essence, writing becomes like thinking on paper. If students get the idea that correctness is paramount, they may begin to censor themselves. Fear of making a mistake can block creative and critical thinking and slow an inexperienced writer to a crawl.
The best method of evaluation is comments in the margin, suggesting that they elaborate or explain something further. If responding to each journal in writing is onerous, simply check that they are being done and respond randomly to a few, perhaps picking different ones each time. Alternatively, you can have students read each other's entries, or you can read some especially good entries aloud as the basis for class discussion. Also consider allowing students to mark some entries as "Private--Do not read." Evaluate the length, but don't read the entry. This allows more freedom of expression.
Dialogue journals are a particular type of journal which takes the level of response one step further. The student writes an entry, to which the instructor or peers respond. In turn, the student responds to the response. This loop can, of course, go on indefinitely, but it has the advantage of encouraging deeper reflection and of modeling for students academic ways of engaging with a topic.
Sample topics for journal entriesWhy did you choose your major? What do you plan to do with it? Did American policies in the Middle East cause the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington? Explain. Do people who dress differently deserve to be treated differently? Why/why not? Are movies being made today too violent? Sexy? Why/why not? Should two years of service to the United States, either military or domestic, be required of each citizen? Why/why not? Which is the best (or worst) position in the family--older child, middle child, younger child? Why? What course in college did you dislike the most? Why? Describe everything you do when you are writing a paper. Should everyone who applies to Texas A&M University be admitted? Why/why not? What is the best method of educating teenagers about smoking, drinking, and drugs?
Additional Resources
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Responding to Student Writing 
