I do think writing journals about content that we’ve read helps me to better understand the texts. Often, I find that after making a blog post, I have more opinions regarding the reading. The journal entries allow me to reflect on the text. If I had only read the text and walked into class, I would be forming my understanding and opinions second hand after hearing my classmates’s opinions.
I’ve noticed that my journal entries are frankly a huge mess of my thoughts. However I do think there are important ideas in them that are useful. For example, when trying to come up with a thesis for the second formal essay, my inspiration came from a part of an old blog post that I had made.
Journaling is quite different from note taking in that it is less demanding in terms of content. Note taking is for informative use and should include as many details as possible. Journaling only revolves around ideas that I want to explore, which is a nice break from the summary journals that we are sometimes assigned. Those are quite like note taking than journaling.
