Journey to Journaling

MANAGING JOURNALING WITHIN AN EXISTING CURRICULUM

The purpose of journal writing is more than just self-expression. The process of writing the entry helps students develop logic and persuasive argument, organization of ideas, and writing techniques. The activity should also improve the writer's style, mechanics, and usage.

Keep your sanity by limiting the number of journal entries per week to a manageable load to grade. Prompt grading and returning of a student's work is important feedback that the learners need. Also, one extremely sensitive young lady in the eleventh grade told me that when I delayed grading them, she thought I wasn't interested in what they had to say. Certainly a teacher wouldn't want to give that impression!

Since most journal-writing is a timed, in-class assignment, often on a "surprise" topic, many instructors do not count off points for spelling, punctuation, etc. However, even if points are not being counted off, the students should be required to correct their mistakes. By doing the corrections, students are learning valuable editing techniques and, hopefully, learning to read proofreader's marks that the teacher has made on the entry! In order for this technique to work, the instructor must give each student a list of proofreader's marks that he/she will be using [and then USE them!] Resist the urge to make the corrections for the student!

Have students make their own corrections on the back. To keep them motivated, try giving a small grade for corrections [like 15 points]. Even a small daily grade will discourage students from skipping their corrections and may even encourage a careless student to be more careful since the more mistakes he makes, the more corrections he'll have to do to get the same number of points as someone with only one or two corrections!
Also, grade with compassion. Find one good thing to comment about in every entry. Use proofreader's symbols rather than a bunch of corrections written all over the paper in red ink. One student suggested that I use any other color than red. I switched to green, pink, purple, etc. and the dread of teacher marks almost vanished. Another idea to ease the complexity of rating a students ideas on a grade scale is to try giving an "all or nothing" grade for the entry itself [this also streamlines grading time!]

NOTE: If an instructor is not clear about his/her

The copyright of the article Journey to Journaling in Teaching Creative Writing is owned by Kelley M. Rubben. Permission to republish Journey to Journaling in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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