Student's Question of the Week
Q: What is a reading journal? How do I use one?
A:
For this answer, we are going to draw upon
the wisdom of Mark Ferrer, English Professor and Director of the SBCC Faculty
Resource Center. The following is taken from Gyrus Learning
Skills.
Reading
Journal Requirements:
Your Reading
Journal is simply the section of your notebook which you reserve for writing
down questions about what you have been reading for the class and the thoughts
which that reading provokes. Use your journal with class readings, exercises,
and lectures so that you can recall your questions, use them to propel the
discussion of the work, and to resolve any confusions you have about the text.
Understanding what you have read is obviously central to being able to think
about what it means. If you want to deal with the meaning and you first have
to attend to the understanding. The reading journal serves that end. Your
instructor may go over your work during conferences.
Reading
carefully requires that you fuse together the meaning, the arguments, the
points and illustrations, the analogies and figures into a cumulative, grounded
sense of the whole. To do this means that you may have to read something more
than once. Take notes. Mark out passages which are elusive or confusing so
that you can relocate them easily to reread or discuss them with someone else.
You will find that you have to move back and forth in the text to clarify
something you read earlier in light of the paragraph or sentence you have
just completed.
Reading
well requires that you develop an internal dialog, an ongoing commentary,
a questioning process, a piecing together of the meaning of what it is you
are reading. To read carefully is often difficult, intellectually demanding,
requiring complete concentration. You have to keep moving across the terrain,
crossing back over familiar ground and then moving forward again. Some prefer
to read a piece through once or twice quickly to get their bearings and then
return to go through it more consciously, more critically.
Parting advice: Write in your books, highlight, underline important passages, write down questions in your reading journal that you want to raise with other students and the instructor about the piece on which you are working. Look up words; keep a list of them in your writing or reading journal. Use some of the techniques discussed in the course book to help you further develop your critical reading skills.
Credit: Picture from Discovery.com.