Connection

Ever since a learned colleague asked me the question, I've been puzzling over the connection between informal and formal learning in the context of journaling and nonfiction writing. So far I have two thoughts. The first is that the informal learning of a journal may loosely and spontaneously find its way into imatative formal writing (writing from models). The second thought is that the informal learning of a journal may find its way into formal writing through the vehicle of keyword indexing and searching (i.e., the journal keeper keeps a list of keywords and furthers his or her research by running searches on those keywords with Technorati, Google, library catalogues, etc.). In these ways the journal's record of a writer's strong impressions continues to guide the creation of content into formal research and writing.