Reading Diary Assessment

First of all, this is the first time that I’ve ever done anything like reading diary, so it took me a couple of posts to figure out which strategy I liked the best. I ended up going with bulleted lists for each chapter, in which I shared all of my random thoughts. I approached this assignment in the same way that I take notes for my science classes, writing down anything new or exciting that I encountered along the way. Looking back at the instructions, my reading diary posts appear to satisfy all of the requirements. On average, my reading diary posts were about 350 words a piece. This was a little shorter than the suggested length, but it felt like an adequate length to summarize my thoughts and hopefully remind me of what went on in the story. When we started reading Buck’s Ramayana I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with new information for my reading diary, but this definitely was not the case. I really enjoyed comparing and contrasting the two stories as I read Buck’s version, which really helped with the length of my posts. I really don’t expect much to change about my reading diary posts throughout the rest of the semester. As we read the next story I’ll probably be more aware of the length of my reading diary, so that might affect the length a little bit. Every now and then, I include quotes if I think that they are really powerful or do a good job of summarizing a particular character. I think that I included one of Rama’s quotes from Narayan’s version that really showed his loyalty, and I used one of Ravana’s quotes from Buck’s version because it showed how reckless and irrational he was. I might also try to incorporate a little more plot summarization. While I certainly don’t want to devote a significant portion of my reading diary to this, a short summary of each chapter might really help me remember what was going on as I had each thought. As I looked back at my posts, it almost seemed like I was trying too hard to avoid summarizing the plot. Overall, I would say that I’ve done pretty well on the reading assignments. I remember quite a bit about what we’ve read so far, but my reading diaries could use a little more information about the actual story along with all of my random thoughts.

For my other classes, my approach to reading assignments really depends on the nature of the class. In engineering, a lot of our textbooks do a really poor job of actually explaining things. They often rely on a couple of example problems to summarize an entire chapter, so I rarely find myself actually reading for those classes (even when the professor suggests it). However, I have also had a couple of classes (like organic chemistry) in which reading contributed to a majority of my learning. In those classes, I have found that taking notes on what I’ve read makes a huge difference in how long I retain the information. There’s something about the process of actually writing down my thoughts that really affects my memory. Another interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that writing something on paper is much more effective than typing it.