time to develop our critical thinking, and
writing in a journal provides us with the
scope to do this more effectively.
• It helps to externalise things – if we
spend too long thinking, things can start to
go round and round in our heads, which can
make us feel confused and overwhelmed.
Writing in a journal gets our thoughts out
on to paper, and often makes our heads
feel clearer as a result.
• It’s a place for offloading – all
research has its ups and downs, and a
journal can be a place for articulating
our feelings, particularly when things don’t
go according to plan. This helps us to cope
with stress and deal with anxiety.
• It helps us to keep on track – most
of us know that in order to succeed we
need a plan; hence the well-known phrase,
‘To fail to plan is to plan to fail’. A journal
can be a secure place (more secure than
a piece of paper that we can lose) for our
research plans.
• It provides us with a record that we
can go back to – most of us think that
we will remember things, particularly
when it is something significant.
Unfortunately, everyday life is hectic, and
we can’t remember everything; sometimes
even important things can escape
our memory.
• It helps us to question our
assumptions – taking a questioning
approach to journal writing (see
Theme 1.5) can help us to address issues
of subjectivity and bias in our research.
• It makes us accountable to ourselves
– a good supervisor will want to know
about the progress we are making, but
the progress we make will always be
down to us. Keeping a journal means
that we can keep a check on ourselves;
for example, how far we have achieved
our goals and what we need to do next.
15
Journal writing can be done in a number of
ways (for example, by hand in a notebook,
on a device such as a smartphone or tablet).
However, the value of writing by hand cannot
be underestimated, and we explore this in the
next theme.
Notes
16
Theme 1.3
The link between
writing and
understanding
Writing is a skill and hence something that we
learn and improve upon. As children most of us
learned to read more quickly than we learned
to write, and many students say that the most
difficult things on their course are their written
assignments. Writing often leads to a significantly
deeper level of reflection than thinking alone, as
it slows our thought processes down.
Writing gives us a much sharper focus and helps
us to concentrate; it is almost impossible to write
about something without thinking about what
you are writing at the same time. So why is this
the case? Research in neuroscience shows that
writing by hand stimulates the reticular activating
system (RAS) at the base of the human brain
(Pérez Alonso, 2015). The RAS acts as a filter
for information that the brain needs to process
and ensures that we pay more attention to what
we are actively focusing on at a given moment.
Writing, therefore, sharpens our focus and is
usually a more effective way of learning than
discussion or reading. This means that you will
be much more likely to remember something you
have written down than something you have
read or discussed; and, in addition, you have
a record that you can refer back to. Having a
sharp focus is one key aspect of carrying out a
good research project.
Writing always involves making decisions
about what to write, which means processing
your thoughts and expressing yourself in words;
this helps your understanding to develop. For
example, when you take notes from reading
a text, simply copying it will not help you to
understand it, but summarising it and putting it
into your own words probably will. In pieces
of written work, you might need to explain
the approach you have taken so that you or
someone else can read it and understand what
you have written. So, the act of writing helps us
to develop our understanding.
However, we live in a world where most of us
use some kind of keyboard more than we write
by hand. In addition, most of us can type more
quickly than we can write. So, do we need
to write by hand? We know that writing by
hand slows us down and helps us to remember
things. An interesting study by Mueller and
Oppenheimer (2014) showed that students
who used laptops for taking their lecture notes
produced poorer-quality work than those who
took