Keeping a reading journal

Here are the steps to follow in starting and keeping your reading journal.

First, browse through the articles under your theme to find one that looks interesting. You can find the lists here.

Note that you may have to click several times to “get down” to a single article (some of the links bring you to lists of articles–I’ll illustrate in the video below). In some cases (the New York Times “Room for Debate” links), there are several short articles grouped together; I’d count those short, topically linked articles as one article.

Click here for a short video that shows how to find articles and videos.

Read through the article you’ve chosen, and mark or note what catches your attention in terms of ideas and the writer’s style and strategies (in other words, try both to read for content and to read like a writer).Then write a short post on your blog that includes the following information (in either paragraph or bullet-point format):

  • the title of the article you read (or video you watched) that functions as a hyperlink to bring your reader to the article (see video)
  • a several-sentence summary of the article’s main point
  • a note of two (or more if you want) things that interested or surprised you in the article (some fact that you didn’t know or some question the article raised or connection you made to your own experience or something else you’ve read or heard)
  • a note of two (or more) things you noticed about the writer’s style/strategies (a sentence you admired, a slick transition, an effective lead, impressive use of evidence, or some other writer’s “move,”  or some aspect of the writing you find not effective)
  • if you’d like, you may also devise a rating system for the articles (or a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down) to alert members in your group to a particularly interesting article they may also want to read
  • Tag your posting with readingjournal (or some similar tag), and add a category link to your sidebar (I’ll demonstrate this in class for f2f classes, and on a video for everyone)

There are a couple of tech issues in connection with reading posts: using hyperlinks for the article title and (if you’d like) categorizing the reading journal posts so you can easily filter them out. Hyperlinks are the usual way for bloggers to acknowledge their sources and to allow their readers to easily access those sources. They also look much neater than a long hairy URL that the reader has to copy and paste into the address bar. You’ll notice that’s how I’ve been directing you around this blog to to external sites as well.  This page from edublogs help info shows how to make hyperlinks.

As for categorizing posts, here’s a short video. For reading journals this is not an absolute requirement, just a suggestion…

One Reply to “Keeping a reading journal”

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