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 SuccessIn 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
- – In this video, I’m going to talk a little bitabout the importance of writing throughout one’s life.Some of you might come to this course,thinking that learning to writemeans learning to composecertain types of writing for school,like an essay, or a book report.While many of us have writtenand will write in academic contexts,we really write in so many other different placesand for so many different purposes.For example, one of the most valuable skillsin any workplace is the ability to communicate clearlywith a variety of audiences.Often, workplace writing involves creating memos,emails, presentations, and even trade documents.One must be able to think about their messageand craft it for different audiencesacross these different workplace genresif they want to be successful in their career,but writing is also important beyond the classroomand outside of the workplace.In the 21st century,more people are more connected to othersthan at any point in history.Through technologies like text messaging and email,and through social media platformslike Facebook and Twitter,our words can instantly reach thousandsand even hundreds of thousands of people.Writing is interwoven with many activities we engage in,and relationships that we cultivate.Learning what we know about writingand what we have yet to learncan help us to more richly understandand shape our robustly textual livesin ways that we may not initially be aware of.As we move through this class then,I invite you to continually ask yourselfhow what you are learning and practicingcan impact the other textual areas of your life.I think you’ll find that the impactcan be quite significant.
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