Most English 100/101 teachers will ask you to keep a journal. Sometimes your teacher will assign journal entries, perhaps asking you to respond to a particular question or a reading you have encountered in class or as homework. At others, your teacher may just ask for a set number of journal entries every week and leave the choice of subject open. Most teachers read your journals regularly, and include your journal keeping as part of the final grade.

Teachers tend to grade not the quality of the individual entries but the process of keeping a journal as a reflection on your academic, social and cultural experiences. Thus, the responsibility for keeping the journal is yours and finding the time, and the inspiration, to write regularly can be difficult. The links may help you jump-start your journal and fend off writer's block.

How Often Should I Write?
The more often you write in your journal, the greater the chance to catch your thoughts. Take your journal with you wherever you go. If you have ten minutes waiting for a friend's class to end, write in your journal. If you are early for a meeting, write in your journal. Write last thing at night, or on first waking up. Try to gain the habit of writing thoughtfully every day, however short your entry.

Try to write some longer entries in the journal. The longer you write, the greater the chance of developing thoughts or finding a new idea you can use in your life or your work.

Even if your teacher gives you lots of writing prompts for journal entries, try to initiate your own entries, too. If you are excited by a new experience, or puzzled by a new idea, use your journal to capture your feelings and responses.

How Should I Write?
Most teachers will expect you to write informally your journal. Informal writing is rather like speaking: you express the maximum number of ideas in the shortest possible time. You don't worry too much about 'correct' punctuation, or grammar, or spelling. You can use underlining, or bold, or italics to add meaning, and you may link lots of ideas together with dashes instead of periods and commas. The idea, not the presentation, is critical in journal writing.

The journal also allows you to experiment as a writer. Sometimes a poem or a dialogue where you argue or debate with yourself is the only way to express an idea. Draw a detailed picture one day. Take a risk!

What Should I Write About?
Your teacher may assign a subject for at least some of your journal entries. Explore the world around you to find inspiration to complete the remainder. Many everyday activities stimulate vivid journal entries:

Observation
If you see something interesting, beautiful, amusing or (add the adjective of your choice) try to capture it in language in your journal. Observation entries help with your academic work: scientists, for example, use detailed observation to test their theories. Set yourself an observation task. Describe everything on your desk and explore each item's meaning for you. Observe for fifteen minutes the people who sit near you in the Johnson Center.

Questions
Use your journal to formulate and record questions that are important to you. Think about questions you have about your academic work, about your personal life or values, about items you read in the newspaper or in the books for one of your classes. Think about what you need to know as a human being in its first semester in college. Don't worry about providing all the answers. Let your own questions flow.

Speculation
Think on paper about the meaning of stories, facts, readings, encounters, patterns you observe, conversations you take part in, movies you see, songs you listen to, treasures you have accumulated. Ask yourself "What if?" and "Why?"

Self-Awareness
Think about who you are and what you stand for. How do you resemble others of your generation or others in your family? And how do you differ? What values are most important to you? What values are changing for you? Where do you stand on ethical or political debates like the rationing of health care or the control of guns? Who influences you? Or whom do you influence?

Digression
Let your writing lead your thinking. You start off writing about your family and find yourself composing sentence after sentence about your favorite song. Allow yourself to drift off the ostensible subject of your entry: often you will discover the ideas that interest you most. The journal lets you explore on paper whatever comes to mind.

Synthesis
The journal provides a space for you to make connections. Put together ideas from different courses. Find relationships between ideas and experiences and cultural events. Link your learning in college to your decisions in your personal or professional life.

Revision
You can also use your journal to reflect on who you are. Read over earlier journal entries and work out how you have changed. Do you have different ideas, or new interpretations of events? Do you disagree with an earlier entry? Can you track the way in which you think and draw conclusions from what you have written? What do you learn about yourself? Try this writing prompt when you have writer's block.

Information
Most professional writers are magpies. They collect quotations, overheard conversations, postcards, photographs, newspaper articles and ideas, and then transcribe them into their notebooks. Do the same. Write down a line from a song that you love, or describe a scene in your favorite movie. Do you have a funny pet story? Or a wild photograph. Make your journal reflect you.