Miami
UNIVERSITY OF
WRITING CENTER
John Bean’s Sample “Exploratory Writing Journal” for
Psychology Students
From John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to
Integrating Writing Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the
Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996. pp.101-4.
Exploratory Writing Journal Assignment
As part of the requirements for this course, you will keep a guided journal in
which you will explore your responses to a daily question or problem that I will give you.
The purpose of the journal is not to improve your writing skills (at least directly) but to
stimulate thinking about issues, questions, and problems raised by your study of
psychology. For the most part, you will be rewarded for the process of thinking, rather
than for the end product. The kind of writing you will be doing is called “exploratory”
writing—that is, writing that lets you “think out loud on paper” without having to worry
about whether your writing is effective for readers. Therefore, such features of formal
writing as organization, correct sentence structure, neatness, and spelling won’t matter in
your journal. This is writing primarily for you; it is not writing intended to be read by
others.
Journal writing of this type can help many students become more productive and
more focused thinkers. Research has shown that the regular habit of journal writing can
deepen students’ thinking about their course subjects by helping them see than an
academic field is an arena for wonder, inquiry, and controversy rather than simply a new
body of information. This way of looking at an academic field can make college more
interesting, even exciting. The more you see yourself in this course asking questions and
questioning answers, the more you will be thinking like a real psychologist.
How do I write a journal entry? I want you to employ a technique that
composition teachers call focused freewriting. When you freewrite, you put your pen to
paper and write nonstop for a set period of time. (If you compose at the computer and
can touch-type, consider turning of the screen (and your IM) so that you can concentrate
entirely on ideas without worrying about the appearance of the text.) Think aloud on
paper, without being concerned about spelling, organization, or grammar. Write as fast
as you can. If your mind suddenly dries up, just write relax or a key word over and over
again until a new thought springs into your mind. In regular freewriting, your mind can
wander freely from topic to topic. In focused freewriting, however, you need to keep
your entire entry focused on the assigned question or problem. Your purpose is to
explore your responses to the question as fully as possible within the set time period.
Here is an example of a ten-minute focused freewrite on the question “Do you
have any fears, phobias, or anxieties that might be explained by classical conditioning?”
Let’s see, do I have any fears or phobias? Maybe I should start out by just trying
to see what fears and phobias I have. I am afraid of moths. I am a male and to be
afraid of moths is to be laughed at. My girlfriend once laughed at me for about an
hour it seems because a moth got into our car and I had to stop and get out
because it flapped around in front of my face. I get kind of creepy right now just
thinking about the flapping wings. It is the sound the moth makes that scares me.
I wonder why I am afraid of moths. I haven’t really thought about that before. Is
that the result of classical conditioning? I can’t remember a time when I first
became afraid of moths. Let’s see right now I just thought about how I am not
really afraid of snakes but I used to be and that I can relate that to classical
conditioning but I still want to think about moths. I’ll come back relax relax okay
back to moths. Let’s see, if this were caused by classical conditioning I would
have to have had at one time a natural fear that wasn’t a phobia—maybe like
being afraid of being crushed by some giant flapping thing. Then I would have
had to have had that natural fear be associated with something else (the moth). In
Pavlov’s dog the natural response was salivating and the natural stimulus was
seeing the food—theses were unconditioned responses and stimuli. Then the dog
began associating the food with hearing the bell (conditioned response). I don’t
think that applies to my fear of moths. At least I can’t think of anytime I learned
to associate moths with something that should have naturally aroused my fear.
Maybe my fear of moths can be better explained by some other theory or neurosis
like Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Maybe a moth stands for something deep in
my dream life. Even as I write this, I feel my fear of moths growing. This is so
stupid. How could I possibly be afraid of moths when . . . (time is up).
As you can see, this writer just followed the stream of his thought, which is a quite
different technique from what you may be used to—that is, thinking first and then
recording later what you thought.
How long is a journal entry? In general, each entry should be the result of fifteen
minutes of concentrated thinking and writing. A skilled freewriter can easily write two or
more pages of single-spaced prose (normal-sized handwriting, narrow rules, normal
margins) in fifteen minutes. For this course, however, one full page of prose is a
reasonable goal for fifteen minutes of freewriting. One page of prose will be considered
an entry, but I hope for somewhat more as the semester progresses. When freewriting,
set your watch for fifteen minutes and write nonstop. If you write a page or more of
prose in that time, you have completed an entry.
Do I get automatic credit just for doing the entries? The syllabus specifies
“quality” entries, but explaining “quality” in this type of work is not simple. You will not
be judged on things like spelling, organization, and grammar. But I will be looking for
evidence that you are thinking seriously about psychology. Many of the entries will ask
you to apply concepts explained in the text or in lectures. Your entries should show that
you are wrestling with these concepts and have done your reading and studying before
attempting your journal entries. Don’t write about operant conditioning until you have
studied that concept in your text. The student who wrote the freewrite on classical
conditioning clearly has read the text and has tried to understand the concepts.
Unlike an essay examination, however, the journal gives you the freedom to make
mistakes. Writing in the journal helps you learn the concepts themselves, and if you get
concepts mixed up, that is often okay. The journal should show evidence of trying,
evidence that you are studying and thinking. The best journal entries will be interesting
for someone else to read because they will show a mind truly struggling with ideas.
Procedures for keeping your journal. Every two weeks, you will be given a set of
tasks, usually more than a dozen or so. Each entry will be a response to one task, and the
more tasks you do, the more credit you get. Number your entries consecutively through
your journal, and begin each entry on a new page. At the head of each entry, write the
date and the number of the task you are responding to. It is important that you keep up
with your journal every week.
Sample Tasks:
Task 2. Suppose you are a parent who goes to a child psychologist for advice on how to
get your ten-year-old child to practice piano. The child rushes out of the room screaming
every time you insist that he practice. What different advice would you get if the child
psychologist were a behaviorist, a psychoanalyst, or a humanistic psychologist?
Task 10. Suppose you had a theory that laboratory rats fed a steady diet of beer and hot
dogs could learn to find their way through a maze faster than rats fed a steady diet of
squash, spinach, and tofu. How would you design a scientific experiment to text this
hypothesis? In your discussion, use the terms experimental group, control group,
independent variable, and dependent variable. Before beginning this task, review pages
17-23.
Task 29. Read the mind-body problem on pages 114-115. Then explore your response to
this question: “What is the difference between a human mind and a computer?”