Education Journaling - An Effective Memoir-Writing Tool

Are you keeping a journal on a regular basis? If you aren't, let me urge you to start one today. The book itself doesn't have to be fancy. Just a regular notebook will do. 1. Journaling is an excellent way of keeping your hand at writing, or remaining fluent at putting words together. Every day, sit down and compose text about your day. "What happened to me today? How did I react to it? How did others contribute or play a role in my day? What was the setting (go into great detail)?" This writing will teach you to be both detail-oriented and meaningfully introspective. 2. Journaling is an effective vehicle for creating archives for future writing. When you are ready to write about "now" in the future, you will already have much of your text written! To compose useful, quality text, ask yourself what you are likely to want to know "then" about what is currently "now." You will certainly want to know details. Describe an event of your day. When did it start? Where was it held? Who was there? Why were they there? What was the sequence of activities? How do you evaluate the experience? If done well, when you are ready to write a story, you can lift entire paragraphs out of your journal and place them with confidence into your memoir. 3. Ranting and raving will probably not be useful to you later. That's not to say that you shouldn't rant and rave in your journal. Doing so can let off a lot of "steam" that is better out than in. Ranting and raving may be important to your mental health but are ineffective for developing text that will be useful for the future, for a memoir. Ranting and raving goes like this: "I'm so mad I could scream! How dare he! Where does he get off!" Ok, so you feel better. Great! This may be therapeutic but the text you have just produced is too vague to be useful later. This sort of writing may not even cue you in a few years to exactly what you were so angry about. Get down to the details. "He said" and "I said," etc. When you get ready to write your memoir, much of the work will already be done. Studies have also shown that writing in detail is actually more therapeutic than ranting and raving! My first journal entries were when I was 17, but it was not until I was 23 that I started to write on a regular basis. That was a few years back (!) and I am very pleased to have all that writing-but I wish some of it was in more detail. BTW...who was this guy Peter who borrowed my bike (my only means of transportation, besides my feet, in those days when I lived in Washington, D.C.) and didn't return it for two months? Boy, was I ticked off. Do you know who he might be? Er... did I ever mention details? Happy journaling. illustration essay