Intended to help teachers avoid the problems of privacy posed by asking students to keep journals or personal notebooks, this starter sheet outlines some of the assumptions behind journal assignments and suggests guidelines for assigning journals. The first section presents a list of assumptions about the connections between thought and language that represent strong pedagogical reasons for asking students to keep journals. The second section discusses how writing in journals helps students interact with and respond to the material being learned and lists a variety of specific, practical reasons for assigning journals. The third section presents the following guidelines for assigning journals: (1) explain that journals are not diaries but are concerned with the content of the course; (2) ask students to buy loose-leaf notebooks and to hand in only those pages that pertain directly to the class; (3) suggest that students divide their journals into several sections, one for each course; (4) ask students to write short journal entries in class; (5) do something active and deliberate with what students have written; (6) award points for student journals, but do not grade them; (7) respond only to those journal entries that pertain specifically to the class; and (8) at the end of the term, ask students to organize their entries and to review what they have written. (JD)