Expressive writing

One common way to categorize writing is to distinguish between expressive and communicative writing. Expressive writing is personal and informal, written to encourage comprehension and reflection on the part of the writer. Open-ended and creative, expressive writing is a good way to start learning about a topic. By contrast, communicative writing is analytic, formal and more or less impersonal. It presupposes that the writer already has considerable knowledge and understanding of the topic, and is writing to inform a reader. It demands adherence to established conventions of tone, voice, diction, evidence, and citation; these conventions will vary according to discipline and type （e.g., lab report, history paper, business plan, legal brief）.

　　Writing as learning begins with expressive writing. Consider what it's like when you're first learning about a topic. Everything is unfamiliar. It's like being in a strange land where not only the terrain but even the signs and maps are unfamiliar, and the words themselves are foreign. That's the situation students find themselves in when they begin studying a field like history or anthropology or biology or business. Expressive writing gives students an opportunity to start to make sense of the world they find themselves in, to bring the myriad facts, definitions, rules, theories, and perspectives to life and impose some order on them.

　　There are many different kinds of expressive writing. We'll look at two types commonly used in school: journals and think-pieces. Both are meant to encourage thinking and learning, and to get students used to using writing in order to think.

　　Journals

　　Many teachers rely on journals （also known as learning logs, idea notebooks, lab journals, or commonplace books, among other names） to encourage student thinking. Journals give students the chance to reflect on what they're studying, to record thoughts, questions, ideas, hunches, or seemingly stray tangents.

　　Journals are easy to fit into any course—five or ten minutes of in-class writing once or twice a week can be enough to keep a journal going （and spark better discussion to boot）. Even if a teacher doesn't require journals, you should consider keeping one. It can help you keep track of ideas you may wish to develop later on （for more on this, see the next section on techniques for generating ideas）.

　　If a teacher requires a journal, the course syllabus should explain what's expected of students, along these lines （the details will vary by teacher, of course）:

　　You may use a bound or loose-leaf notebook to hold your journal. On the cover put your name and course title, along with the title Journal. You may write entries by hand or include notes printed from your computer. You're free to put what you want into the journal, but remember that its primary purpose is to record your own ideas. You are required to bring your journal to every lab and lecture. The journal grade （20% of the total grade） will not be based on grammar, spelling, or appearance, and only partially on the quality of the work. It will be based mainly on the degree to which the journal shows steady thinking and work throughout the class. Journals will be spot-checked occasionally during the semester.

　　Thinkpieces

　　Thinkpieces, or whatever you want to call them （response papers, reflections, reaction papers, etc.） require （and foster） more independent thinking than text summaries. In thinkpieces and similar assignments students decide what to write about （though sometimes teachers pose open-ended questions students must respond to）. Part of the challenge of this kind of writing, of course, is learning the material well enough to sort through it. Teachers can simply collect thinkpieces at set times, or require students to share them with other students to spark further thinking; they may even require collaboration, in which a team of students works jointly on a thinkpiece.

　　I don't grade thinkpieces on presentation, but I do grade them for the quality of their thinking （some teachers prefer not to do that）. The only rule I'm strict about is that they can't be late, because of their topical nature.