Chapter 10

Journal Entry # 10

How does discussion help you understand your feelings and clarify your thinking about a selection you are reading? How does writing help you understand your feelings and clarify your thinking about a selection you are reading?

Nobody, including our professors and lecturers, know everything, but everybody knows and can contribute something. This is the essence of discussion where students share knowledge among each other. No scholar could write or teach anything without the work of other scholars. In the same way, group discussion clarifies the course materials more fully than any student could do alone. Discussion opens a whole new opportunity to express our feelings about what we read. In addition, a well organized and thought out discussion helps students develop higher level thinking skills.

Writing on the other hand, helps us reflect on issues which we have read. Writing also helps us to stay focused and alert. Thus it prevents us from daydreaming, losing our train of thought, or worse, falling asleep. Writing forces us to think through clearly the thoughts we are trying to express because our readers are unable to ask questions to clarify what is written. When we write we will usually reread what we have written to check for clarity and then rewrite to improve our writing. This process will lead to deeper processing of what we have read.

So both discussion and writing help us to understand our feelings and clarify our thinking about what we have read. Discussion does this by providing a sounding board for our ideas as well as providing contrasting opinions. Writing does this by forcing us to reflect more deeply and clarify our ideas for an audience that will be unable to ask for clarification.