Reading Diary: Week 8

I know that the main purpose of the reading diary is to record your responses and emotions. However, although the instructions state not to focus on summarizing the stories, that is what I do. Yes on occasion I will write down if I do or do not like a story, but for me, I personally benefit from summarizing. Summarizing the story helps me pay attention better.

I have always struggled in paying attention when I’m reading something. I can read an entire story, get to the end and then realize I didn’t comprehend a single word. Because of this, I almost have to summarize. When I summarize the story, I break almost every action down. Doing this helps me follow the story and make sure I don’t miss anything.

Another reason I have chosen to summarize each story is that it helps when I go to write my own version. These summaries allow for me to completely remember and comprehend what happened in each story, and thus make my selection on what I want to write about from there. Then to a certain extent, my summary of the story is already my retelling and I just have to add the details, and dialogue from there.

For all of these reasons, I am partial to the summarizing. I think it is the most effective way for me to learn. I can consider changing my diary posts, however, I would prefer to summarize.

As far as the lengths of my reading diary posts are concerned, I take extensive notes since I am summarizing. This makes my diary posts very lengthy. However, over the past recent weeks, I have been trying to ease up on my summarizing and sticking to big picture things and putting more opinion in. Doing this has made my diary posts shorter for some stories, specifically the stories I don’t care for. However, when I like a story, then I tend to add more detail to it in case I decide to retell it for that week.

I know that what I am doing is not exactly what the instructions are asking of me, however, I think it is the best way for me to record my readings. Like I mentioned before, I struggle in paying attention when reading and the summarizing of the stories helps with this issue. I hope that is okay, and I will try to improve on stylizing my reading diary more to the liking of what was mentioned in the instructions in the future. It will just be a bit of a transition for me. Overall though, I think the reading diaries are very helpful, especially when it comes time to retell a story.