Journal Entries

See course calendar for due dates
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Your journal entries are a place for you to work out your thoughts and confusions about the course material and to prepare for upcoming assignments. They are also a way to demonstrate that you are keeping up with the course workload. They will vary in length, but they will usually be brief (~1-2 pages). You will write each one in response to a prompt that I will provide, and this page will be updated throughout the semester with the prompts for each journal entry. I will aim to post the prompt for each week a journal entry is due by Sunday evening of that week.

Table of contents

Journal Entries

Journal Entry 1: Due Friday, January 27

Please complete both parts of this journal entry.

Part A

In “How to Read Like a Writer,” Mike Bunn provides sample questions that you can ask yourself whenever you read a piece of writing to learn how to read like a writer. These questions include:

“What is the author’s purpose for this piece of writing?” (79)
“Who is the intended audience?” (79)
“In what genre is this written?” (77)
Given a specific passage, what technique(s) does the author use in that passage, and is it effective? (81)

Please answer each of the above questions in relation to Alice Walker’s 1975 essay “Looking for Zora.” For questions #1-3, you should answer each question and then write ~1-3 sentences explaining how or why you arrived at that answer. What specific aspects of the essay or of your knowledge of the essay led you to answer each question in the way you did? For question #4, please select 1 specific passage from Walker’s essay and copy and paste or transcribe that passage into your journal entry (please make sure to cite the page number on which it appears in the essay); identify 1 technique Walker uses in that passage; and then explain in no more than 1 paragraph how or why you think this technique is effective.

Part B

The second part of this journal entry involves writing up your grade contract for the semester. You will contribute in large part to determining the grade you will receive in this course by fulfilling a grade contract. There are no specific formatting requirements for this assignment; you can structure your contract however you would like. However, your grade contract should include the following:

The grade for which you are contracting and the requirements you will meet in order to receive this grade. You can find the requirements for each contracted grade on our course info & policies page under “Contract Details.”
A brief discussion of your attendance and participation goals for the semester (no more than ~1 paragraph). How many absences are reasonable and acceptable, given the grade you want to earn in this class and your schedule and other commitments this semester? How do you plan to fulfill the requirement, as it says on our course info & policies page under “Contract Details”, to “participate actively in class activities and discussions”? For some examples of what constitutes active participation in class, see the “Participation” section of the course syllabus. You should seek to challenge yourself but also remain realistic with these goals. For instance, if you often don’t speak in class, you could make it your goal to contribute something to class discussion at least once per week, and/or to come to office hours at least three times during the semester to discuss course material and/or your writing with me one-on-one. Conversely, if you tend to contribute a lot to class discussion, you could make a goal to wait to make your second or third contribution in each class until others who haven’t yet spoken have had a chance to speak. If you find that your class attendance tends to trail off halfway through the semester, make it a goal to miss only 1 class each month, etc.
Any adjustments you already know you would like to make to assignment deadlines. If, in looking at your schedule for other classes and thinking about how you will balance your commitments this semester, you already know that you would like to take an extension on an assignment’s due date (or several assignments’ due dates), this is the place to indicate that. Please state the assignment and your suggested due date. In general, you should aim to submit assignments within a week of their listed due dates, and all assignments to date must be submitted by the two “last-chance due dates” listed on our course calendar. Again, you can also request deadline extensions throughout the semester; this is just an initial plan. See the “Late Work” section of the course syllabus for more information on late work.
Your 3 writing goals for the semester. We will talk more about this in class, but these should be 3 concrete, specific, and accomplishable goals that you will aim to achieve – or to be on your way to achieving – by the end of the semester. They can focus on specific writing conventions, such as, “I want to understand how to use textual evidence more efficiently and appropriately in academic writing,” or “I want to learn how to write strong thesis statements,” or “I want to learn how to expand beyond the traditional 5-paragraph essay format;” they can focus on you more generally as a writer, such as “I want develop more confidence in myself as a writer,” or “I want to learn more about how to successfully incorporate feedback and constructive criticism into my revision process;” or they might focus on you as a student and a thinker more generally, such as “I want to avoid putting off my assignments until the last minute,” or “I want to turn all of my assignments in on time,” or “I want to develop my skills as an academic researcher by becoming more familiar with how to access and understand academic research.” After writing each goal, you should write ~1-3 sentences reflecting on what you plan to do to help yourself accomplish this goal.

Journal Entry 2: Due Friday, February 3

This journal entry is designed to help you complete your first major writing assignment in this class: Writing Project 1, which is a close reading essay.

You begin a close reading by reading. Closely. And repeatedly. Look for individual words, phrases, narrative perspectives, shifts in tone or tense, etc. that strike you as unexpected, interesting, puzzling. Then try to work out why they stand out. For example, why does Nanny describe herself as “a cracked plate” (20)? What is evoked in this word choice? Why is important that Hurston included the scene with the buzzards at the end of the story of Matt Bonner’s mule (61-2)? Why include this scene, which is seemingly unconnected to the plot of the novel, and why include the buzzards’ incantations over the mule’s carcass (62)?

After collecting these observations, you should look for patterns across the story/poem/text: Are words or phrases repeated and/or subtly changed? For example, how is pollen or the effects of pollen described on page 11 vs. on page 25? How is the novel structured, and why? What is the result of these patterns in the text?

Your journal entry 2 is about practicing the above skills. It should include the following things:

A list of 5 observations of particular words, phrases, or passages in Their Eyes Were Watching God that strike you as unexpected, interesting, or puzzling. Each observation should consist of a direct quote from the novel and then a brief explanation of or question about what you find unexpected, interesting, or puzzling about this observation.
A description of at least one pattern – or potential pattern – that at least 2-3 of your observations form. You should write a few sentences (no more than 1 paragraph) about how the observations you’ve selected fit together (or how they might fit together). These sentences might also include questions that you have about this pattern (or potential pattern). You don’t have to fully answer these questions now.
A ~1 paragraph reflection on the above process. Feel free to reflect on any of the following questions: What (if anything) was easy for you to do, and why? What (if anything) was hard for you to do, and why? What do you find confusing, vexing, or anxiety-producing about close reading? What do you find interesting or engaging about it? What have you learned about yourself as a close reader so far?

Journal Entry 3: Due Friday, February 10

This journal entry is designed to help you complete your first major writing assignment in this class: Writing Project 1, which is a close reading essay.

If you completed journal entry 2:

Go back and read what you wrote for journal entry 2. Then, copy and paste your list of 5 observations about the text from that journal entry into this one (you can make revisions or changes based on my feedback if you would like).

Your journal entry 3 should include the following things:

2-3 new observations from the text. As in journal entry 2, each new observation should consist of a direct quote from the novel and then a brief explanation of or question about what you find unexpected, interesting, or puzzling about this observation.
A description of at least one pattern – or potential pattern – that at least 2-3 of your observations form. This pattern can be different from the one you wrote about for journal entry 2, or it can represent an update to that pattern. You should write a few sentences (no more than 1 paragraph) about how the observations you’ve selected fit together (or how they might fit together). These sentences might also include questions that you have about this pattern (or potential pattern). You don’t have to fully answer these questions now.
A ~1 paragraph exploration of what you plan to write your close reading essay about. This reflection should include a statement of your preliminary claim about the text. What pattern or patterns do you think you will use as evidence for this claim?

If you did not complete journal entry 2:

Read through the prompt for journal entry 2. After reading the prompt for journal entry 2, you are ready to begin journal entry 3.

Your journal entry 3 should include the following things:

A list of 5 observations of particular words, phrases, or passages in Their Eyes Were Watching God that strike you as unexpected, interesting, or puzzling. Each observation should consist of a direct quote from the novel and then a brief explanation of or question about what you find unexpected, interesting, or puzzling about this observation.
A description of at least one pattern – or potential pattern – that at least 2-3 of your observations form. You should write a few sentences (no more than 1 paragraph) about how the observations you’ve selected fit together (or how they might fit together). These sentences might also include questions that you have about this pattern (or potential pattern). You don’t have to fully answer these questions now.
A ~1 paragraph exploration of what you plan to write your close reading essay about. This reflection should include a statement of your preliminary claim about the text. What pattern or patterns do you think you will use as evidence for this claim?

Journal Entry 4: Due Friday, February 24

This journal entry is designed to help you complete your second major writing assignment in this class: Writing Project 2, which is a historical context essay. It focuses on writing a description of your archival object. For this journal entry, you may select any of the materials assigned for class on the following days: Wednesday, Feb 22; Friday, Feb 24; Monday, Feb 27; Wednesday, March 1.

In their essay “At Work in the Archives: Place-Based Research and Writing,” Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Jessica Rose write, “Beginning your research by creating a description of your source will help you understand what you are examining and help capture small, easy-to-miss details” (131). This is why we are writing this description. The description of your archival object should include discussion of the physical or material aspects of the object as well as the context of its creation and original use or circulation.

Your journal entry 4 should be around 500 words long. It should include the following things:

A description of the physical and/or material aspects of your archival object. To write this description, you might consider the following questions: (Please note: We are examining digital representations of archival objects in this class. However, for the purposes of this assignment, you should try to answer these questions about the actual physical thing, not its digital representation.)
- What kind of thing is your archival object? If it’s a text, is it a literary text or some other kind of text? In what genre is it written? If it’s not a text, what is it?
- Who created or produced it?
- When was it originally created or produced? Do we know?
- If applicable, what is the size of the physical archival object?
- If applicable, what materials or technologies were used in its creation or production?
- If applicable, where is the object stored or archived today? Where or how can researchers access it now?
- Are there any other unique features or distinguishing characteristics of this object?
A contextualization of the object in which you discuss the conditions of its creation and its original use and/or circulation. To write this contextualization, you might consider the following questions:
- How or why was the object originally created or produced?
- What was the purpose of its original creation?
- For whom was the object originally created? Who was its intended audience? Was it ever published?
A Works Cited page in which you appropriately cite your selected archival object (and any other sources you use in this journal entry) according to MLA format (not included in word count). We will discuss MLA formatting in class on Wednesday, Feb 22 and Friday, Feb 24. You can find a handout in our class Google drive folder (In-Class Activities folder), and you can find in-depth information about how to cite a variety of sources using MLA format on the OWL Purdue MLA Formatting and Style website.

Writing this description may require some light additional research about your selected archival object. You can find a lot of information about Hurston and about many of these materials online. You also may wish to consult Chapter 25, Chapter 26, and/or Chapter 27 of Valerie Boyd’s biography of Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows, which detail the time in her life around when she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God. I have made these chapters available to you in our Course Readings folder. You should ask me for help if you are having trouble writing this description of your archival object or if you can’t find answers to questions you have about it.

Journal Entry 5: Due Friday, March 3

This journal entry is designed to help you complete your second major writing assignment in this class: Writing Project 2, which is a historical context essay. It focuses on connecting your archival object to Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Your response to the first two questions below should be around 500 words long. You can write about the archival object you wrote about in journal entry 4 or about a different archival object.

Your journal entry 5 should include the following things:

An explanation of how your archival object relates to Their Eyes Were Watching God. It could relate to the novel in any number of ways. For example, if you selected recordings of one or several of the songs Hurston collected during her fieldwork in Jacksonville, FL in 1939 as your archival object, you might consider what these songs reveal about everyday Black life in Florida around the time Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God. What specific connections can you draw between these songs and the novel? If you selected Hurston’s essay about Florida turpentine workers that she wrote for the Federal Writers Project in 1939 as your archival object, what does this essay reveal about life in the American south for Black workers during the time that Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God? If you selected the letters from Hurston and/or Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten in 1930 and 1931 about the play Mule Bone as your archival object, what do these letters reveal about Hurston as an ethnographer or author that might be pertinent to Their Eyes Were Watching God? Etc.
An analysis of at least 1 specific passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God that reveals a relationship to your archival object and/or that your archival object helps us to understand in a different way. You may wish you analyze more than 1 passage from the novel in your journal entry, but you must analyze at least 1.
A Works Cited page in which you appropriately cite your selected archival object and Their Eyes Were Watching God (and any additional sources) according to MLA format (not included in word count). We will discuss MLA formatting in class on Wednesday, Feb 22 and Friday, Feb 24. You can find a handout in our class Google drive folder (In-Class Activities folder), and you can find in-depth information about how to cite a variety of sources using MLA format on the OWL Purdue MLA Formatting and Style website.

Finally, your journal entry 5 should include a response to the following question (not included in word count):
Based on the feedback you received on your writing project 1, what 2 things do you want to focus on improving in your writing project 2? This might include resolving issues with surface conventions (grammar, punctuation, syntax, citations, etc.), working on your argument, contextualizing and explaining the textual examples you provide, clarifying the organization of your essay, etc. You can be brief here.

Journal Entry 6: Due Friday, March 31

This journal entry is designed to help you complete your third major writing assignment in this class: Writing Project 3, which is a research conversation essay. It focuses on discovering and selecting the scholarly sources you will write about in this writing project.

Your journal entry 6 should include the following things:

A 1-2 sentence description of your research topic for this project.
- For this writing project, your research topic should be focused in some way on Zora Neale Hurston’s writing. It should be specific and focused enough so that the scholarly sources you collect have ideas and concepts in common, but not so specific that it becomes too difficult to find related scholarship. For example, your topic might be something like “scholarship that focuses on the depiction of women in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” This topics is specific yet broad enough that you are likely to find many related scholarly sources. However, a topic such as “scholarship about Their Eyes Were Watching God” is probably too broad; a quick look in Google scholar confirms that the novel has been cited at least 3300 times. Conversely, “scholarship that discusses Janie’s hair in Their Eyes Were Watching God” is likely to be too specific as a topic. Selecting a topic that is too specific will make it too difficult to find related scholarship, while selecting a topic that is too broad will make it difficult to determine which sources you want to investigate further.
Properly formatted citations in MLA style for 5 scholarly sources that are related to your research topic. At least one of these sources must have been published in the past 10-15 years. One of these sources can be one of the scholarly sources we read in class (Lamothe or Mitchell), if you so choose.
- Remember, as the Writing Project 3 assignment page states, a scholarly source is a source that:
  - Is written by an expert or experts in the topic under investigation. Usually, this will mean that they have a PhD in a discipline related to this topic and that they are employed by a university or college, but this is not always the case.
  - Is published in a venue that focuses on academic research and scholarship and whose primary audience is other researchers and scholars. Usually, this will be an academic journal, or a book or an edited collection published by a university press, but this is not always the case.
Under each citation, include the following information about each source:
- A brief description (no more than 3-4 sentences) of how that source relates to your research topic.
- A brief description (no more than 2-3 sentences) of how you found that scholarly source (e.g., “I mined the bibliography of Lamothe’s article,” or “I found this source by searching through the scholarly sources that have cited Lamothe’s article,” or “I found this source by searching for the keywords ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and ‘religion’ in the Project Muse database”, etc.).
An indication of which 2 scholarly sources you are planning to write about in journal entry 7 and in writing project 3 (you can change your mind). Again, one of these can be one of the scholarly sources we read in class (Lamothe or Mitchell), if you so choose.

Please note that I do not expect you to read through all 5 of the scholarly sources you find for this assignment! In fact, this assignment is geared toward helping you to learn how to skim scholarly sources quickly and efficiently to see if they are related to your research topic. We will talk about how to skim scholarly sources in class when we discuss Rosenberg’s essay, “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” on Wednesday, March 22.

Journal Entry 7: Due Friday, April 7

This journal entry is designed to help you complete your third major writing assignment in this class: Writing Project 3, which is a research conversation essay. It focuses on identifying and analyzing a shared concept or idea that cuts across both of the scholarly sources you selected in journal entry 6.

Your journal entry 7 should be at least 500 words long (not including your response to #4 below). It should include the following things:

A clear articulation of one shared concept or idea that cuts across both of your scholarly sources.
Analysis of how each of your selected scholarly sources grapples with this shared concept or idea, including how these sources approach this shared concept or idea differently. Your analysis must include at least 1 quote from each scholarly source that relates to this shared concept or idea.
Properly formatted parenthetical citations of the two scholarly sources you use in writing your journal entry, making sure to cite the page numbers on which any quotations you use appear. You should also include a Works Cited page with correctly formatted citations of each source cited in your essay.
Based on the feedback you received on writing projects 1 and/or 2, what 2 things do you want to focus on improving in your writing project 3? This might include resolving issues with surface conventions (grammar, punctuation, syntax, citations, etc.), working on your analysis, contextualizing and explaining the textual examples you provide, clarifying the organization of your essay, etc. You can be brief here. Your response to this question is not included in your journal entry’s word count.