Journal Entry Guidelines

When grading your journal entries, I will be looking for the following:

1) Did you follow the page count requirements? Do you have at least three full pages, typed and double spaced, per entry? Did you include a Works Cited page, as a fourth page?

2) Did you discuss the real life horrors that the book, film, game/electronic literature piece might deal with, in detail? Do you connect these to the time and place the book/film/game was created? Are they specific enough--for example, if you are writing about American Psycho, you could discuss how the novel unpacks 1980's Wall Street and shows how yuppie culture, and unchecked capitalist greed, leads to horror. To give another example, you could discuss how The VVwitch deals with the Puritan's belief system in the supernatural and their fear of the unknown in a new land, where their lives were very harsh (because it is a modern film, it is presented in a feminist way--arguably in favor of the witch).

3) Do you provide lots of examples from the work you are looking at? (You should include plenty, and cite them properly).

4) Did you make any connections to other books, novels, and horror media we are discussing in the class, or that you've seen elsewhere? This is not required for every entry, but I want to see it in a good number of them.

5) Is your thinking original? Or are you just re-hashing what we discussed in class? You can use our discussions as a jumping off point, but please don't simply regurgitate what we covered in class entirely.

As a reminder, feel free to combine two subjects into a longer entry of 6 pages. For example, you might want to write about The Exorcist and Jennifer's Body in one longer piece, since we will be discussing the ways in which these two narratives intersect in the ways they deal with teen girls bodies and possession.

*Please note that you do not want to simply summarize the book/film. You need to be making socio-political connections beyond simply describing what happens in the book or film.