Warming up: journal exercises

The following exercises will help you practice writing explanations. Read all of the following exercises and then write on the three that interest you most. If another idea occurs to you, write a free entry about it.

1. Choose a term or concept from a course you are taking and explain what it means or is. Assume that your audience is someone who is not enrolled in that class.
2. Imitating E. B. White's short "definition" of democracy, use imaginative comparisons to write a short definition — serious or humorous — of one of the following words: "freedom," "adolescence," "mathematics," "politicians," "parents," "misery," "higher education," "luck," or a word of your own choice.
3. Novelist Ernest Hemingway once defined courage as "grace under pressure." Using this definition, explain how you or someone you know showed this kind of courage in a difficult situation.
4. When asked what jazz is, Louis Armstrong replied: "Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know." If you know quite a bit about jazz, explain what Armstrong meant. Or choose a familiar subject to which the same remark might apply. What can be "explained" about that subject and what cannot?
5. Observe the behavior of people in some specific place — at a party, in a cafeteria, at a sporting event, on the street, in a supermarket or department store, on buses or trains, or at  the  beach.   After  observing  the   variety  of  behavior, "explain" the people you find there by classifying them into types.
6. Choose a skill you've acquired (for example, playing a musical instrument, operating a machine, playing a sport, drawing, counseling others, driving in rush-hour traffic, dieting) and explain to a novice how he or she can acquire that skill. Reread what you've written. Then write another version addressed to an expert. What parts can you leave out? What must you add?
7. At your place of work, you've just hired a substitute to fill in for you for one day. Write a note to that person explaining what he or she should do and how to do it.
8. Three-year-old children are insatiably curious. They ask any older person around them a never-ending series of "why" questions. Imagine you are going for a walk in a familiar place with a three-year-old. What questions might the child ask you about either strange or commonplace things or occurrences? Select one "why" question. First write out an explanation of that question for another adult. Then write your explanation for the three-year-old.
9. Anger can come so suddenly and swiftly that sometimes we are unaware that, like other emotions, it has causes. When we become angry with someone, we usually assume that the other person's attitudes or actions are sufficient cause. Often, however, our anger has other causes that may be related toour experiences on that particular day or in the past. Choose one particular time when you were angered by someone. Then, in two separate lists, analyze what this person did to make you angry, but also what you had been doing or worrying about before your angry outburst. Review these two lists and explain which combination of causes were necessary and sufficient to cause your sudden anger.