*Materials complements of Professor Michelle Troy, Communication

1. The On-Line Reading Log (length of each entry will vary depending on what you have to say and how engaged you are as you read)

Each of you will need to maintain a regular reading log on the Blackboard site for the course to record impressions of, responses to, and reflections on assigned works as they are being read and studied. These logs should be useful to you in several ways. First, they will help you to notice what you notice as you read — the first step towards becoming an independent and powerful reader. Recording what you notice in your log will also help you discover the value of your own impressions, observations, questions, and other responses as starting points for illuminating discussions of literary works. Your log will also provide you with a place to do some low-stakes writing, experimenting with critical approaches and new strategies of analysis introduced to you in this course. Finally, the responses, reflections and experiments recorded in your log will serve as a reservoir of ideas and first-draft writing you can draw upon for the public and more formal papers you will submit during the semester.

I will give you guidelines in class about how to find and work within your on-line reading log in Blackboard. Because we are trying to create a community of readers, we will also draw names in class to find each of you a reading-log partner. You have the option each day of simply writing your own entry on your reading, or of engaging in an on-line conversation with your partner that would let you start asking questions about the reading before we return to class. We will discuss sample log entries in class to give you some more precise guidelines. While your log is largely a private document, written primarily for your own use, I will ask you occasionally to share some entries with other classmates beyond your partner and to allow me to audit your logging work.

Your log will be of most use to you as a resource and as a record of your reading if you carefully date each entry and make it clear what text or segment of text you are writing about.

2. Reading Log Audit (two to three pages, plus copies of three log entries)

As a way of reporting your work-in-progress, please conduct the reading log audit described here and submit an audit report by Monday, October 1 ~ Your audit report will include two major sections: 1) your own descriptive, analytic, and reflective account of what you find in your reading log (about two to three pages), and 2) three sample entries from your log. In putting together your report, make sure you address the questions listed under each heading below:

a. Description: A Brief Tour. The idea of the description is to show your readers what they would see if they were to read your log. You should answer questions such as: How many entries have you written? What is their average length? How many texts have you written about? What does your log look like?

b. Analysis. In this section of your report you should discuss the content of your log entries, answering questions such as: What do you usually talk about in your entries? What elements of poems or stories do you tend to comment on, or what is it that you tend to talk about in your commentaries about these \ writings? How have your entries changed (if they have) over the past few weeks (changes in length, topics, language, and so on)? What might account for differences in the content, length, or quality of your entries? What else do you notice about your log entries? Refer to specific entries as examples. Feel free to quote from your entries as needed.

c. Reflection. think about what your log entries amount to. Do you find any worthwhile writing in your log? Have you found any reason for keeping a reading log other than because the instructor assigned it? If you were the teacher of this course, would you ask your students to keep a reading log? Why or why not? What do the sample entries you have included show your reader about your log?

d. Sample Log Entries. Choose three log entries that you feel are representative of the content of your reading log. These need not be the “best” entries, but rather those that you feel offer the most accurate picture of the kind of writing your log contains. Please photocopy these entries for submission as part of your audit report, showing the date when each was originally written. If the entries that you would like to submit as most representative are not legible, please type them out or otherwise rewrite them legibly before including them in your report.