Discourse Journal

Throughout the semester you will keep a journal for this class. I will collect this journal three times throughout the semester and use some of the information, questions, research, and/or analyses you record in this journal to develop questions for class discussion and for the two exams. While this is a grammar class, and your journal should reflect your increasing awareness of language as language, I will not scrutinize your work in the journal for grammatical "errors." Journals are primarily reflexive, personal, individualized forums, so the writer determines the level of standardized "correctness," not the reader, a grammar guide, or a larger discourse community.

Your journal will include (but should not be limited to) the following:

• Specific grammatical problems you encounter/those you are learning
• Responses to the reading assignments
• Responses/analyses of your field research
• Responses to field documents and research
• Sentence/style analyses
• Rhetorical analyses of documents
• Revised passages from documents you bring to class or gather in your research
• Responses to class discussions

You may write this journal on computer and print the work you have done when the journal is due, or you may handwrite the journal.  Since you will be analyzing some grammatical issues and problems that you encounter in texts (both written and spoken) that you find, you will want to include these texts with your journal entries about them.

Journal Due Dates

• Thursday, March 7
• Thursday, March 26
• Tuesday, April 23