Journal for Intro to Language
"No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start to drop off." -- Gustave Flaubert
Your Language Journal
The syllabus states: "Rather than quizzes or minithemes, you will journal over each text or film that we view. Each journal entry will be due at the beginning of class on the day of our first discussion of the text(s). The complete semester journal will be due at the end of the semester."
Normally, your journals will be due on the day it is listed on the syllabus. The course readings are intended to overlap and feed into one another, so you should expect our discussions and schedule to be fairly fluid. While we may not discuss a reading on the assigned day, it is generally important for you to have read it by that date.
While most of the time what you specifically write in your journal will be defined by you and the texts we are reading, I may on occasion ask you to write on a specific topic. Your journal is an informal place for you to demonstrate that:
- you read the text in entirety.
- you are seriously wrestling with the content of the assigned readings.
The best way to approach this assignment is to begin by summarizing the reading (if the reading is fictional, you will only want to summarize to the extent that your summary engages with the theoretical ideas in the class). Then, with a relatively good handle on the subject, discuss and work through one or two passages which you did not understand.
A journal entry:
- should demonstrate that the student read the entire text
- uses quotations and provides page numbers. Show me that you have paid attention to details--this is very important in critical writing!
- should make connections between readings
- should summarize the text (a good way of ensuring that a reader truly understands the point of a text)
- should be no less than 200 words in length and no longer than 350 words for each text
- should demonstrate careful and meticulous reading and thinking. Don't lift a quotation out of context.
- is coherent, nicely tying ideas and paragraphs together
- should generate questions
Grading: Your journal entries are not graded as they are submitted. I simply note whether they were on time. Your entire journal will be graded as a whole at the end of the semester.
Note: at the end of the semester, you should not bother hastily throwing together entries that you missed. They need to be done on time to be part of your journal. As the syllabus indicates, you will be turning in your journal during finals week. There really is no reason for you to give me a hard copy of the journal however.
Simply do the following:
- paginate your entire journal
- create a contents page with page numbers
- save your entire journal as a PDF file (MS WORD would do as well).
- my hope is that through the process of your journaling, many of the texts began to overlap and reinforce one another: it is appropriate, therefore, to include a statement concerning the whole journal, describing how it came together for you. Find one topic or theme that reappeared several times through your hournal and focus on how your feeling on that topic changed as the semester progressed. This statement is REQUIRED.
- If you INCLUDE journal entries that were not submitted earlier in the semester, please indicate clearly on the contents page that you are so that you may get credit for your work.
- I keep all journals submitted to me during the semester; if you misplace one, just come by my office.
You may email your journal to me, but a hard copy on CDR might be a little safer (you do not want me to misplace your journal!). If you do email your journal, make sure I send you a reply email stating that I received your document.
Sample Journal Entry
Angela Santo
Intro to Lang and Lit
Journal for "Me" and "White Privilege"
"Me" is about questioning who we are and the ideology of "I" in literature. "Me" argues that we should question who we are because we are born subject to others (125). Language has made us subject because we are born to it. We are subjected by language because we are named right at birth, and we can not escape being �bound up with language" (126). As we have discussed in class, names are a part of our ideology. Take my name, Angela, for instance. The root word of my name is angel. My name itself means Angelic. I can not imagine that I am truly angelic as the word and my name implies. Does my name affect the way people think of me? Should I be worried about living up to my name and to the ideologies behind it?
"Me" even goes on to personify language by saying that it uses us (128). We are sometimes limited by our language because we are restricted by what we can or can not express. However, literature has become " 'the institution which allows one to say everything, in every way' " (129). Literature gives us the freedom of being any "I" we want to be. But to say that literature frees us from subjectivity is ideological in itself. I think that we are trapped even in literature because of language. We may be only able to write a novel or poem in one language following a certain literary canon. Even if the novel or poem is translated it is still trapped within in the original language because the translated version can never be the same or have the same feeling as the original.
GRADE RUBRIC for 2009
Total Journals: 22
______/100 22 entries
______/95 20 entries
______/90 18 entries
______/85 17 entries
______/80 16 entries
______/75 15 entries
______/70 14 entries
______/65 13 entries
______/60 12 entries
______/55 11 entries
______/50 10 entries
______/45 9 entries
______/ 40 8 entries
______/ 35 7 entries
- Subtract up to 10 for no page references
- Subtract up to 10 for no clear focus
- Subtract up to 10 if journals did not cover entirety of text
- Add up to 5 for a solid final journal "statement"