Writer's Journal # 3

Joyce Meyer said, “We don 't grow when things are easy, we grow when we face

challenges.” Joyce Meyer couldn't have said it any better. This quote is a perfect example of how the course assignments have been very challenging but I am learning a lot of new things and building my writing skills. So far the Journals really get me thinking about when I started writing and why I started writing in the first place.

The first journal entry was a struggle because when I was asked to think about who I was a writer I didn’t know. At first I was just thinking this course would be just like a high school English class but I was wrong. So far these journals to me have helped me develop as a person and really question myself. Writers Journal is helping me discover the writer in me that I never even knew was inside of me.

The instructions for this course and assignments weren’t clear for me in the beginning at first only because I couldn’t dig deep into my past like I was being asked to. Writer’s journals helped me dig in and think of what I did in the past and that's actually helped me with things in my life. I have learned by reflecting on my past life experiences that it helps me unravel things I had never thought I knew. The expectations of the assignments also help me grow in writing skills and I like the challenge the instructions and the assignments themselves are challenging.

The more challenging the assignment is the better because it creates a lot of ideas that we may have when being challenged mentally. In Ameet Ranadive’s article “ Writing clarifies Thinking,” he states, “There are three key reasons why writing enables you to structure your ideas: framing, prioritization, and synthesis.” I believe that if we frame, prioritize ,and synthesize, that gets us thinking that we do these things on daily bases so writing does structure our thinking. Upside of this would be that writing helps us in so many ways on a daily basis, for example, when you go to the doctors you think of how you are going to explain why you're in pain. Second, you will have to make sure you prioritize what hurts the most and all other details that are important.

Then, you must put it together and make sure it all comes together so then the doctor can understand what's going on and can help you. So yes writing does structure our writing and that's good because it helps us make sense on a daily basis. If we didn't have writing we wouldn't think about the stuff we say or do. Another upside to writing being the structure of our thinking is that without it our ideas would never make sense but with it makes sense. Framing, prioritizing, and synthesizing help us organize all the things we think into something that makes sense so we can get it and still make sense.