The use of the prewriting journal in a writing-about-literature course for college freshmen

This study examines how successful journals can be as prewriting tools in a writing-about-literature course for college freshmen. The results, based on testing of two papers from eighty freshmen and the comparison of journal entries to those papers, show how more than 50% of the students used journals for each paper to write clear, well-organized papers for purposes of communicating ideas about literary themes and genres to specific audiences. The study discusses samples of the students' writings and gives assignments teachers can use to implement the prewriting journal in a writing-about-literature course. Because of the success of pre-writing journals in other composition courses and the problems with teaching writing in freshmen college literature courses, the study concludes that the journal can be beneficial in making the literature of the course easier for the student to grasp and use in writing.