Take some time looking through the journals linked on this webpage. These assignments will be much easier for you if you explore the various journals, and then zero in on those that interest you. If you don’t do this and simply look at an arbitrary journal chosen at random, it might be full of material you don’t like, and writing a response is going to be more difficult.
These responses are not supposed to be written like “book reports”, or “English papers”, however those genres might have been expected of you in the past. Nor are these supposed to be summaries. Think of them as informal letters where you give yourself time to think about what you’re reading. Raise questions, express your immediate reactions, be honest about what you’re thinking. But also give yourself some time to reflect upon what you read. Read some of the selections more than once, and pay attention to how your thinking evolves and changes as a result.
You might think about responding in one of these three ways: text to text, text to self, text to the world. Here’s what’s meant by that:
Text-to-text: Write about how the texts you’re reading compare or contrast or relate to other texts you’re familiar with (literature, film, television, art, music, etc–we’ll refer to all of these things as “texts”).
Text-to-self: Write about how the texts relate, or not, to your own experiences, or family, or personal interests.
Text-to-world: Write about how the texts bring to mind things happening in the world (past or present, or even possible future scenarios.)
You don’t have to choose one of these and adhere to it throughout the response; these are just prompts to get you thinking. A good response might include all of these; then again, it could focus on just one area.
Push yourself to read as much as possible in each journal, and to respond to as much of it as possible.
