CLASS DOCUMENTS

(After Shedletsky, (1989). Meaning and Mind: An Intrapersonal Approach to Human Communication. ERIC AND SCA, pp. 3-5. The Journal

The central exercise in learning about one's own intrapersonal communication is keeping "The Journal." This journal is an open-ended record of any and all intrapersonal experiences that you wish to record. Some will pursue an underlying theme throughout most of their entries; others will skip about, influenced by course materials and their own shifting foci. Regardless of style, you will find the journal extremely useful in bringing the course concepts alive, in finding an interesting topic for a final essay paper, and in gaining a view of the often overlooked universe within, the boundless possibilities of one's own mind.

Goals: The joumal serves three main purposes:

to motivate you to observe yourself
to increase awareness of, and control over, intrapersonal communication
to allow you an unstructured arena in which to explore a wide range of intrapersonal behaviors, some of which are mostly private (e.g., emotions, attitudes, physiological reactions, confusions, and more).

Approach: You are asked to keep an intrapersonal communication journal. A separate notebook exclusively for this purpose is best (for an online class, keeping the journal on your computer will work). To protect your privacy, you may wish to use a notebook that allows you to remove pages when the journal is handed in (feel free to edit your digital journal). The basic instruction for keeping the joumal is simple: "Notice when you've experienced an intrapersonal event, and write about it--describe it, discuss how it fits with the larger context of your mind, and how it influences your behavior."
As with most journals and relatively unstructured exercises, the beginning may be slow and awkward, but a major payoff comes with giving yourself room to find your own intrapersonal communication. We can aid the process in a number of ways:

We can devote class time early in the semester to students who wish to speak about their joumal entries.
I can offer my own recent intrapersonal experiences as examples of potential joumal entries.
We can generate ideas in class for joumal topics from readings, discussion, and handouts-such as listening, dreams, daydreams, emotional triggers, musical experiences, pain, smells, touch, physiological reactions, stress, associations, forgetting, selective attention, distractions, ambiguous interpretations, tip-of-the-tongue and slip-of-the-tongue experiences, feelings about oneself, errors, sometime "automatic" behaviors (like driving, thought during deep involvement in an activity, and others), and self-dialogue.(*See Edwards, Honeycutt, & Zagacki, 1988, for an excellent empirical study of self-dialogue)
Samples of student journal entries.
We can seek out structured exercises (for instance, see Barker & Edwards, 1980; Dauw, 1980; or any of the exercises in this book). You might try to select a listening context (i.e., a person or a situation e.g., lectures) and to track your intrapersonal behavior while you listen, to catch yourself, and to write about your behavior. The key here is to get writing and to get some feedback so they can feel that they are on track. It is all right to explore. Consider these entries from student journals:

Listening, do I listen? Most times I do. Since Tuesday I have become so aware of my listening habits. I do get distracted in class by things I don't understand and my mind goes to things I do understand. The past three days I have become aware of how outside stimuli effect [sic] me when I'm in my car. How I react to the things they do that I think are stupid. I become angry, only for a few seconds, but angry none the less.
To some degree I have a low tolerance for ambiguity. I usually want clear-cut easily defined situations. I want to know where I stand and then I'll decide what I'll do about it.

On the locus of control my feelings are varied. I believe God has a plan for each of us but that I with Him am the master of my fate, that certain changes can be made and I must accept the consequences of my decisions and if what happens is contrary to what I thought I wanted, to adjust myself to that until another choice comes along. I would consider myself an intemal because I do not believe outside forces can control my life. Rain, snow, etc., but doesn't control what goes on inside me, my intrapersonal relationships.

What a relief to find out I was not the only one who did not grasp what Condon is talking about. But even better than that to be told that concrete people have a problem with semantics. I've been doing such a mental put down on myself, thinking I was stupid, dumb, to the point of thinking maybe I should just leave school and get a job because I don't have what it takes to grasp this intellectual ideal. I didn't even admit to myself what I was doing to myself, or maybe I wasn't aware of what I was doing. It was as if a weight were lifted off me and once the fear of stupidity was removed, I could be objective. Not understanding one book does not make me stupid.

*Edwards, Honeycutt, & Zagacki. (1988). Imagined interaction as an element of social cognition. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 52 (1), 23-45.