Reading Diary Self-Assessment

                As the semester has gone on, I was starting to think I was doing the Reading Diary posts wrong. I had kept the posts on the stories rather short, so the entire post was not very substantial. I was just writing bits and pieces of things I thought while reading the stories and how I might use the story in the future. Upon reading the Guidelines for the Reading Diary, I was reassured that this was exactly what I should be doing.

It’s super helpful this way, too. While reading through my Reading Diary, I found a couple of stories that I had read that I would like to include in my Storybook. I had just written a couple of notes on these stories, but these notes triggered the part of my brain where the story was stored, and I was able to remember the plot I had read weeks ago. The summary of the story wouldn’t have been beneficial since the short notes reminded me what happened in the story. It was these notes, though, that made me see an association with the story and the theme of my Storybook.

I do notice, however, that I comment on almost every story I read in a given unit. This isn’t bad, but it does make the post a little cluttered with useless information. I will probably focus on the stories that I consider to be my favorites and write about them. This is hard to do, though, since I comment on a story I like right after I read it. When I like most of the stories in a unit or find most of them interesting, I end up writing about almost all of them. Perhaps I will raise the bar to REALLY liking them before commenting on them.

Overall, I think that the Reading Diary is a great assignment that is easy to complete and proves to be very helpful to other assignments. I refer to my Reading Diary often for my Storytelling assignments, and I have found inspiration for my Storybook within the comments in my Reading Diary.