Thoreau submits an essay on the prompt “Of keeping a private journal or record of our thoughts, feelings, studies, and daily experience, — containing abstracts of books, and the opinions we formed of them on first reading them,” for a class assignment given him on 20 December 1834. Thoreau is also given the prompt for his next essay, “We are apt to become what others (however erroneously) think us to be: hence another motive to guard against the power of others’ unfavorable opinion,” due on 31 January.