To the Editor

So much appeals to me in the pedagogical approach Jeff Berman delineates in his book Diaries to an English Professor that I was delighted to see his further discussion of introspective diary writing in your Spring 1996 issue. Since I began using Berman's teaching approach—which is consistent with my own philosophies of self-reflective thinking leading to personal growth—in my classrooms starting in January of this past year, there are several points in Berman's article that I would like to highlight in relation to my own teaching experiences. First and foremost, I wholeheartedly agree that introspective diary writing can successfully be used in courses where literature and psychoanalysis are not the focus. My incorporation of Berman's teaching approach has adapted his methodology to the setting of a composition classroom. I maintain, of course, the same crucial safeguards: diaries are confidential, they are ungraded, they may be written on any topic ranging from self-disclosure to ideas for formal essays, and my return comments are neither judgmental nor psychoanalytically prescriptive, but rather an act of responding with objective em-pathy. I do select several diaries to read each week, and the act of selection becomes a self-reflective exercise as to why I am selecting the specific diaries to which I am drawn.

Often, and this is certainly true early on in the semester, it is the students who determine which diaries are read, since they must plainly note on the face of their diaries when I am not to read their entry for the week. As the semester progresses, and true to Berman's experiences as well, fewer and fewer of my students declined permission to read their writing out loud. In many instances, after several weeks of reading diaries out loud, specific students were requesting that I read their diaries out loud, arguing for reasons why their entry should be selected, and often highlighting their request with transparent-ink markers or different colored pens. I r