DEJs and TEJs

Double- and Triple-entry Journals are tools for building literary analysis skills. When you read a part of a novel, non-fiction piece or poem that helps you better understand what you're reading, prepare to make that part into what's known as an excerpt. Generally speaking, if something that an author has written helps you better understand whatever concept you're studying (what it means to Come of Age, why differences in cultural perspectives matter in human lives, or why different perspectives help to build more sophisticated understanding of anything, etc.), that writing is a great candidate to become a Double- or Triple-entry Journal excerpt.

Double-entry journals have two columns: one for the excerpt, and one for the analysis. They look like this:

Here are some sentence starters or frames for writing double- and triple-entry journals. You may write your double-entry journals in many ways: individual pieces of paper, in a Writer's Notebook (the composition notebooks I asked you to buy for this class), in some Pages files, or as Google Docs. I'm flexible... If you'd like the Pages template, please notice that I've attached it at the bottom of this page.

Triple-entry journals have three columns: one for the excerpt, and then two others. There are different ways that the triple-entry journal can go from here, but some options include analysis while reading with a column for reflection after finishing the text. Another triple-entry journal option is to have one column for excerpts, another for naming the type of rhetorical appeal the excerpt shows, and the third for analysis.