Introduction

The Digital Reading Journal focuses on the Process Outcome of the ENGL 1101/1102 program. During the semester, I responded to various prompts connecting course material to contemporary issues and other media. Through these posts, I learned that I can tell that I need to understand the material better if my sentences become long and unwieldy. This journal helped me improve my writing process because transcribing my thoughts on course content required me to sufficiently support those ideas, and when my support was thin, I stretched out the ideas. This was exacerbated by several rounds of information-adding revisions. I am including an early post that shows my least developed writing and a later post with my best writing. These two posts are my "process documents" for this assignment because they show how, as I understood the material better, I was better able to avoid rambling sentences devoid of content. The supplemental imagery also changed between these two posts. In the first, it is pretty generic and reiterates the more vague points I'm making, but in the second, my images are in fact directly relevant to the content and increase the value of the article more than just visually.

Digital Reading Journal

Goals

This assignment has two goals: the first is to assess and improve understanding of course material, and the second is to develop a writing process and reflection skills. The assignment has asked me to relate the course material to other things I read, watch on television, or see on the Internet, in various weekly prompts. These prompts ask me to develop a relationship with medicine and the normative idea of health, so that I can develop ideas about this social construction outside of course material in popular culture. Developing a writing process is a major goal of the program, and this reading journal represents a more sustainable writing process. I can transfer the practice to other projects, writing out my ideas semi-formally before I create the final work. I will use this strategy when I'm working on larger communication projects to think out the connections with other cultural or analytic ideas.

Purpose

The reading journal is a blog organized into weekly prompts about class readings and the course theme of health. The prompts are open-ended questions about course material like "...explain how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde represents the moral dimensions of health..." that require critical thinking and assess understanding of the material (as a replacement this year for in-class discussions). This writing process also creates value as a reference: in my essays and in the final video, I reused ideas, quotes, themes, and concepts that I've developed in my journal entries. These ideas are particularly focused on popular culture and modern issues because "health" is a general lens for social issues and language.

Audience

This is a personal journal, so I am the main target for my writing. Formal writing is, however, still required because writing out ideas where they make a cohesive argument or at least are individually valid. Proper argumentation or presentation enhances its value as a reference because I can directly reuse the analysis I've already done. Because of the fact that strong rhetoric can make it easier to develop strong rhetoric in the future, I have written in this journal to an imagined academic audience familiar with the course material. I also see value in practicing argument, particularly with health and the standard course material being reused in the Reading Response Essay artifact and the theme in the Medical Object Video. That's why I try to develop a convincing case in each post rather than rattle off a list of ideas for future use (which would make for less interesting posts).

Design for Medium

There are three ways in which this medium is distinct from other written media, like an essay or an article. Firstly, I control the surrounding design and theming: Wordpress is a great tool for background visual design. I chose to go with black-on-white text and a pretty standard theme because I don't want the colors to get in the way. I also didn't use anything other than the plain blog as the main page because the project is for personal use. Secondly, the blogposts are much more visual than a standard essay. I reused (with proper credit, of course) Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr and Wikimedia to enhance my writing and interject other points or have a visual reference for the entry. Lastly, the web gives different techniques for a website to be passable, like alt text for accessibility and the ability to link out to sources (a boon to the quality of each entry).

Revision

Each post is a process document, so they are meant to have developing ideas, but there are still improvements I could make to the posts and the design. Firstly, I think I underused the electronic medium. While I included some photos in each post, they didn't always develop my ideas further, and I could have looked further than just highlighting the points I had already made. Three other electronic-specific tools I underused were links to other sources and bold and italics. Both of these would increase my rhetorical strength by highlighting a central theme. For an academic reader of the arguments I'm putting forth, emphasizing the thesis or key terms might give them a clearer understanding of what I'm presenting, and a better resource to review for myself.

Process documents

Earlier Post

This earlier post shows how I used very long sentences to deflect the need for clear, substantive arguments and used similarly insubstantive image supplements.

Later Post

In this later post, my writing has grown and the text and images are coherent and build on a single argument, and because of that, my sentences are shorter and more focused.