Exploring Grasmere

Dorothy Wordsworth's journals are powerful examples of the value of writing on a daily basis, particularly for students. In her numerous volumes, she documented both important events and common details that, though they were never meant for publication, translated into works of art. While her writing is commonly known and taught for its contribution to the poetry of her brother, William, and to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth's journals also serve as a model for the creative benefits of journaling itself. By reading Wordsworth's entries as the first drafts of a gifted writer, students could gain a wealth of knowledge not only about the Wordsworth family's history but also about the value of exploring even the most simple of ideas through writing. Education scholars and artists alike advocate the use of journals to unlock "and unblock" creativity. The act of filtering thoughts into written text, they argue, helps tease out larger ideas and further focus them into more polished products. By reviewing books and articles about the positive effects of journaling and relating them to Wordsworth's work, this paper will demonstrate how her journals can be used to model for students the importance of daily writing.

While any of Wordsworth's entries would work in this capacity, the The Grasmere Journals may be of particular interest to students because they contain her reaction to her brother's marriage " a dramatic and complex view of her own emotions. Kept between 1800 and 1803, these journals document her life with William at Dove Cottage, the writing occurring around her in the community, and the culture of 19th Century England. They also, as Susan Levin argues, explore the purpose of journaling:

Writing in the form of the journal itself is seen as evoking the presence not only of a distant loved one but of the journal writer herself, who writes so as not to quarrel with herself, so as not to be self-divided, so as to maintain her own coherency ... the moment of writing connects with the process it describes (20).

Students could, therefore, engage not only in the information Wordsworth recorded but in the writing process itself. They may also be drawn to the idea that they have access to her private thoughts as opposed to a polished product meant for others to read.

Many teachers already employ the use of journals in their classrooms. They ask students to write about what they have read, what they have learned and what they did on their last summer vacations. Some students, however, are intimidated by the task of writing. Others see it as a means of playing the game of school. They write for their teachers and for their grades, not for themselves.

Kim, for example, is a student who had trouble with her writing. She was a teacher education student in Bill Strong's class at the University of Utah, who he used as the subject for a recent article entitled "Writing across the Hidden Curriculum." Kim, according to Strong, had always regarded school as a game and writing as a means for playing that game. Throughout her career as a student, she had downloaded papers off of the Internet or dictated ideas to other students, who, in turn, wrote her assignments for her in exchange for her help with their math homework. For her, "the teacher's task was simply to assign, correct, and grade writing; and the student's job was to "psyche out" the teacher and write to specifications" (no page).

Seeing the act of journaling through Wordsworth could help students like Kim change their perspectives. Even if they are not destined to become poets or novelists, students of all backgrounds and interests could benefit from learning from her examples. They could use her journaling techniques to improve their own skills and to learn about literary techniques. They could also use her entries as models for analyzing information they receive. They could, perhaps most importantly, learn from her about the art of self-expression.

Using Wordsworth's Journals to Help Students Improve Their Writing Skills

Students who keep daily journals like Wordsworth's improve their writing skills. They can apply and practice the style lessons they learn to their personal writing, which would be especially inviting if teachers don't grade that writing for grammar. Over time, the entries would reflect what each student has retained and applied, as educator Mike Rose demonstrated in his book, Possible Lives. During a tour of schools around the United States, Rose visited a teacher in Maryland who asked her third-graders to write regularly in journals. Many of the students showed marked improvement over the course of the school year as they incorporated the other lessons they learned into their work. One student who was considered to be a "behavior problem," for example, began his journal early in the year with an entry reading, "newtafricanfrog." By the end of the year, however, his skills improved so dramatically through practicing journal writing that he could produce:

On friday we went on a trip. And it was fun at the trip. And we saw a man with firer. And he got a beloon and he bust the beloon (120).

If third-graders can show the kind of progression that student did through daily writing, students in higher grade levels could also greatly benefit from keeping journals. Teachers could use Wordsworth's work to demonstrate how keeping journals sharpens writing skills by comparing an early entry to a later one, asking students to discuss contrasts and comparisons. Students could, for example, analyze the first entry on May 14, 1800 and compare it with the last one, written on January 16, 1803. They could look for differences and similarities in content, mood, tone, and other grammatical and literary devices. When students are empowered to evaluate her work at this level, they will not only learn more about the devices themselves, they will also learn to view authors as fellow writers instead of regarding them as intimidating figures.

Using Wordsworth's Journals to Demonstrate Analytical Skills
Wordsworth's journals can also serve the broader purpose of promoting learning through what education scholar Norman Unrau calls "exploratory writing." This type of writing, which includes free-writing and journaling, serves to connect students to background knowledge; construct and sort out meanings; discover questions and possible answers and reflect on thinking and problem-solving processes (285). Free-writing in particular, he argues, helps students to reach their authentic voices. Even if the teacher prompts a free-writing assignment with a question " what he calls 'focused free-writing,' students can reach that level of authenticity while sharpening their analytical skills.

Wordsworth's journals exemplify this type of exercise because she wrote about her surroundings not only with surface details but also with a profound insight that students can learn to emulate in their own work. As biographers Robert Gittings and Jo Manton explain,

The sights and sounds of the Lake Country stirred her nature to its depths; the daily entries, so simple and truthful in their account of common things, distil and deepen the ordinary life to a spiritual experience (120).

Her observations on a walk on November 24, 1801 exemplify her ability to demonstrate this profundity in simple, natural objects such as trees. Through use of simile, she transforms a birch into a "flying sunshiny flower": "It was a tree in shape with stem in branches but it was like a spirit of water" (Holt, 73).
To explore this idea, students could read this entry as a prompt and then take a nature walk with their journals. They could free-write about their experience, keeping in mind Wordsworth's use of simile to describe the birch tree. Perhaps her words might help them see the familiar in a new light, similar to the way she compared that tree to water.

Her entry on July 27, 1802 " the day William married Mary Hutchison" would also be useful as a free-writing example and prompt. Wordsworth mentioned the marriage in the midst of a lengthy description about her journeys to Dover, Canterbury and Calais:

At a little after eight o'clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the church. William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring " with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn the whole of the night before " he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently (Holt, 166).

This often-quoted excerpt has the potential for encouraging students to ask many questions about Wordsworth's reaction to the marriage, especially when they analyze the writing itself. If students, for example, ask about her relationship with her brother, the teacher could direct the students back to the text itself instead of calling on historical scholarship for answers. Students could complete a focused free-write about why Wordsworth sandwiched this episode in between long descriptions of other events, why she wrote about wearing his wedding ring, or how they think she would feel if she knew they were reading this entry. They could also mimic her ambiguity by writing about a significant event in their own lives with similarly limited detail, like the birth of a sibling or a move to a different city.

The shorter entries would also be an easy, bite-sized way for students to practice exploratory writing. On October 29 and 30, 1801, for example, Wordsworth only wrote three words: "Rain all day" (66). Through close reading, students could ask questions that they could later ask of themselves for their own journals, like: Why was she concerned about the rain? Was she depressed because of the weather? Did she stay inside all day? Why are these entries so short? Was she too busy to write more? After interrogating Wordsworth's work, they could write a simple statement like she did, reflecting the thoughts on their mind in less than ten words. Possible ideas might be: "Lost the game last night." "Rode the bus to school this morning." "Girlfriend dumped me." After writing these short, unedited thoughts in their journals, they could use them as springboards for longer passages, or they could simply appreciate the exercise as a way of creatively venting their feelings.

By using Wordsworth's journals' content to prompt free-writing, students can learn to analyze both her work and later apply that skill to other literature they read. Her rich descriptions of nature and her explication of her own emotions provide insightful examples for them to follow. Once they formulate ideas for how and why she wrote the way she did, they will be able to understand their own writing and thought processes on a deeper level.

Using Wordsworth's Journals to Encourage Self-Expression
Perhaps the most important lesson students can learn from Wordsworth's journals is the value of self-expression and its relation to creativity. In her best-selling book, The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron argues that daily writing is essential to what she calls, "creative recovery." She champions the practice of keeping "morning pages," entries of stream-of consciousness thought, as the "primary tool for creative recovery." Morning pages are similar to Unrau's concept of free-writing, but they are less-focused. Her rules for the pages are simple: there is no wrong way to do them and they must be done everyday.

These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing; writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid or too weird to be included (10).

While Cameron is not an education scholar, her suggestions for creative awakening through writing could easily be applied to the classroom because, like artists trying to find inspiration, students have minds cluttered with thoughts that are not always about the task at hand. Teachers could dedicate the first five to ten minutes of each class for this stream-of-consciousness exercise, using Wordsworth's journals as models. As demonstrated in her inclusion of both long and short passages, she wrote what was on her mind, even when she didn't have much to say. If students could unload some of their feelings onto paper at the beginning of each class, perhaps they could achieve more focus. They would, at least, already be engaged in the act of writing in the first few minutes of class.
Though some hard and fast grammarians may disagree, the style and structure of these entries shouldn't matter, even if students use journals to practice their skills. As Pamela Woolf writes in the introduction to a 1991 edition of The Grasmere Journals, diary writing is a reflection of reality, not of a grammatical ability:

Dorothy Wordsworth had her times for noticing, remembering, and writing and her times for doing. There are no rules and structures for diary writers, as there are not for living: we take the fast and slow of it as it comes (ix).

Teachers could offer participation grades for the completion of these pages, perhaps, but the point of the strategy is to inspire, not intimidate.

Dorothy Wordsworth's journals are rich examples of the lessons Rose, Unrau and Cameron, among others, students can learn from writing on a regular basis. By following Wordsworth's lead, students could keep journals for a variety of purposes that may not even be immediate to them, like improving their technique, their cognitive skills and their ability to express themselves. Though they may not ever choose to publish their work, they can, like Wordsworth, still learn to be great writers.

Works Cited

Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Penguin Putnam,
Inc., 2002.

Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1985.

Levin, Susan M. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. New Brunswick, Rutgers: 1987.

Rose, Mike. Possible Lives. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Strong, Bill. "Writing Across the Hidden Curriculum." National Writer's Project: The
Quarterly. www.writingproject.org. Winter 2003.

Unrau, Norman. Content Area Reading and Writing: Fostering Literacies in Middle and High
School Cultures. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson, 2004.

Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. Edited by Pamela Woolf. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991.

Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journal. New York: Holt and Company, 1987.