Tonight I am delivering my workshop on Teaching the Journal Genre. I am really excited about having this opportunity. In my own life, I have used journal writing as a way to engage in personal and reflective thinking. Journaling has also given me space to generate new ideas -- to "write myself into clarity." I can still remember the first diary I got when I was about eight years old. It was white leather and it had a lock with a very small key that I kept in my bank-safe (which was also where I kept all my baby-sitting money. In this journal I recorded my daily activities, like where I road my bike, what books I got at the library, and what fun I had with friends or my cousin on the weekends. I can also say that one of the reasons why I wanted us to read Tompkins' (2012) sixth edition rather than seventh edition (2017) is because in the sixth edition, Tompkins still identifies journal writing as it's own genre with uni...