An Online Journal Entry Reflecting on the Online Journal

I have really enjoyed keeping an online journal for this class. Although I do understand (and agree with) many of the reasons for keeping notebook journals, I definitely prefer this online method. The main advantage to actually writing on paper, for me, is that writing fits more with the pace of critical thinking. However, I think that writing a little bit in our notebooks at the beginning of some class periods is a great way to balance this out and keep up some good old fashioned pencil-and-paper writing.

I like the online journal so much because I have found that it forces me to write better--and to think better too. Since I know everybody can see that I am keeping up with writing or not keeping up with it, I am much more motivated to stay on top of things. Furthermore, because this is a published blog that anybody can read, I try to make my writing better, or at least write so that my ideas make more sense--I flesh them out more than I would in a notebook. This is good, because the more I flesh out an idea, the more I am forced to critically think about that one idea and delve even deeper into it than I originally intended. I do feel like this has improved my writing and made response papers much easier (the notebook did this too, but not to the same degree).

I can see why people don't love the online journal. When we're stressed and neglecting it, it becomes obvious that we haven't done any work in a while. Not only is it much harder to procrastinate, but procrastination also leads to much more guilt. This is a good thing, because it forces us to update our blogs more regularly and be less stressed to throw something together the night before it's due (not that everybody did that; but occasionally I'm sure we all felt a bit rushed during that week of the journal deadline). It's also difficult to write for the public. Even though it's not likely other people will read this blog, it is very public to our classmates. While I think this makes for even better writing, it does not allow for as much scattered writing or more reflective writing that we may not want to publish on the internet. I think the simple solution to this is for us to write in notebooks if we feel compelled to write something that we don't want to publish. Or, we could simply compose a post but not publish it. Then we would still be doing all types of writing, but we could simply write without publishing.

The biggest advantage I see to an online journal is that it is easy to keep track of. I remember Mr. Mitchell stressing in Coming of Age that he wanted our journals to be something we could look back on as a record of our thoughts the first time we read these books. I agree that the journals are extremely valuable in that sense, and the fact that they are online makes it much easier to keep track of them (paper notebooks are much easier to lose over the years). So even if we didn't publish everything we wrote on these blogs, we could still come back to them ten years later and read both the published and unpublished entries, without having to worry about searching our old school things for an easy-to-lose paper notebook.

Overall, I really like the online journals and hope that they will continue to be used in years to come (and if they aren't, then I'm glad I at least got to create one), but I also see the value of private paper-and-pencil writing and I hope that remains a part of this class as well.