Students are required to keep reading and video viewing journals. The reading journals will be kept in blue books which will be distributed. They will be collected on a regular basis (see below for information on how these will be graded). You should start a new page for each entry and put the date at the top. The video and computer materials journal will be sent to me in the form of e-mail. You should save and print out your journals. I will respond to each of them via e-mail--and e-mail only.

What sort of information am I looking for in your reading journals? Each entry should contain a list of at least five questions, which reflect your responses/reactions to the reading assignments. You are to bring your journal to class and be prepared to talk about your questions, since they will be an important part of our class discussions. In fact, they will form the basis of our in-class discussions, since the questions that students have often indicate the important issues of interpretation and understanding literary texts. The questions you ask should be those worth talking about; questions of interpretation and understanding (not "information" or yes/no questions). We will go over some sample questions together in class when we begin our first text.

The purpose of this exercise is to encourage you to become engaged, active readers--not passive recipients of information, rehashing plot summaries in over-generalized terms. Over the course of the semester, I will expect to see development and growth in the types of questions you ask, since you will become more experienced in how to read these texts and interpret them.

I will collect your journal questions at the end of each text read. You will choose three texts over the course of the semester for which you will take one of your journal questions (or a question that came up in class, if you find it more relevant) and answer it in a brief essay. You should hand in two essays by the mid-semester point and one other before the last day of classes.

Journals will be graded Good, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory journals may be rewritten. All journal essays must be typed. You will gain valuable computer experience if you use a word-processor (with spell-checks) to type your answers. No essays will be accepted in handwritten form. Your journal questions, however, may be handwritten in the blue books.

You can see from these instructions that it is extremely important for you to keep up with the readings and with the journal entries. You neither contribute to the class nor do yourself much good if you come to class without having read the assignment or written out your questions.

The e-mail journals for the videos and computer materials will take the form of explaining what you find to be the important information communicated in them. You must not write e-mails that say things like: "This video was interesting. I liked it. It was good." If you make such statements, then you must be prepared to give concrete examples to explain how and why the videos (or CD-Roms, or Internet sites) were "good" or "interesting." The video and computer materials serve as enhancements to the understanding of the medieval and early modern (primarily Renaissance) periods. One purpose of the electronic journals you are keeping is to remind you of the content of those materials and to get you to understand and articulate in what way or ways they increased your knowledge about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Internet resources will introduce you to doing research on the World Wide Web. You will find a separate link on our class home page to the official explanation of "How to Cite References From Electronic Media." The rules about plagiarism obtain for electronic texts as well as for printed texts. Any violations of these rules will result in an automatic "F."

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