Writing equipment

Journals started off as a private record, think of Samuel Pepys, one of the earliest known journals written in code so other people could not read it. With the establishment of mass communications came the opportunity to share journals e.g. newspaper social diaries, television, video diaries. However it is only with the internet that there is an opportunity to share writing in real time.

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Picture taken by vanhookc

It is so easy to share your writing using the web, with blogging sites e.g. WordPress, Blogger, article sites e.g. Ezine, Squidoo and fiction sites e.g. FanFiction, Fictionpress. In 2005, it was said a new blog was created every second, so people obviously like this method of sharing their writing. But can you write the same online, knowing it will be public as you can in a personal notebook or computer?

I’m sure some people can, but I can’t.

My online writing

My first blog was on Livejournal and I never worked out why I should write there as well as in a journal so it became a strange collection of updates and notifications from other sites. This may explain why I didn’t keep it for much longer than a year. I started a blog on productivity and goals in 2007 and most of the posts are on topics that I would not think about including in my journal. Last summer I kept a log of our summer holiday so my family could read how my 1.5 year old daughter found her first sailing trip, but kept a journal at the same time.

So I’ve had several years when I’ve kept a blog and a journal on similar topics, what does it tell me?

Comparison of online and personal writing

I’ve collected extracts from my blogs and journals which were written on the same day and the same topic.  ... Read more 1312 words, 1 image

As the start of the new year approaches, people often think about starting a journal. There is no reason why you need to start a journal on the 1st January, but it is a popular time to start, perhaps because of preprinted diaries. If you are thinking of keeping a journal here are some ideas for the type of journal you could keep.

Time capsule

This is a record of events that are important to you, for instance news or sports stories. You could simply keep newspaper cuttings or you could add your thoughts and comments on the headlines. I kept one of these at school which covers the first Iraq war and my sister kept one of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. It does not need to be national events, it could be more local events, for instance connected to your local town, school or sports club.

Specific topic

You many want to follow your progress on a specific topic, such as your exercise habits or children. You may find it useful to start these entries using a template so you can easily track progress over the year, such as exercise undertaken, weight. These journals do not need to be limited to one topic, for instance Ira Progoff encourages writing on different topics and filing each topic within different sections in a folder rather than chronologically.

Dreams

A dream journal should be written every morning as soon as you wake up to capture as many details of the dream as possible, the longer you leave it after waking the fewer details you can remember. You could just capture the dreams or you may want to analyse them using a dream dictionary , or just looking at the imagery yourself and suggesting meanings; it is often easier to do this a few days after having the dream. It is good to give each dream a title and keep an index of them so you can review them later, perhaps monthly, and notice any patterns.  ... Read more 1564 words

In the past, I’ve known people to feel threatened when they learn I keep a journal. This feeling always surprised me, but I’ve recently discovered that my mother in law has started keeping a journal and its made me think what it is like from the other perspective. This is almost completely new because although I know my sister, husband and sister in law have all kept journals in the past, I believe they were all fairly short lived.

Photograph by edenpictures

Journals are a great way of providing social context to history and as the journal writer that context is in your hands.  So how do you feel about people close to you writing journals, such as friends or family and adding their views to the social context? You could see it as a threat as their writing may provide a different point of view, but I see it as a great strength. For instance, when I read the first part of Virginia Woolf’s diary there were footnotes with information from other sources expanding on points that Woolf glossed over.

When my daughter is learning to write I will encourage her to write a journal as I hope it will teach her to enjoy writing and to respect the privacy of my journal. In the future, I hope she will enjoy comparing our journals and viewing events from our different perspectives (this is something  I would love to do with my childhood).

Therefore, I don’t feel threatened by my mother in law’s journal; in fact I’m curious about it. She looks after my daughter one day a week and I’m sure she will write about the time they spend together. As I haven’t written a lot about my daughter as times, I’m sure in the future her journal will be a pleasure to read for both me and my daughter.  ... Read more 339 words, 1 image

Kate and sister

I’ve had a lovely long weekend at my parents and had the opportunity to catch up with lots of family I haven’t seen in a long time, including sisters, nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles. A topic of frequent conversation was tracing the family tree because my sister and several other family members have been working on ours for many years.

It is amazing the information available to trace your family back generations, including their livelihood and the the exact house they lived in. Of course this information is available through official records, but the interesting part is often the personal story found through photographs and letters. So what is the equivalent today? For me it is emails, digital photographs and perhaps this blog.

Initially digital seems like a great step forward for the preservation of records, but how many emails from family and close friends are deleted as we are now overloaded with emails and photographs rarely get printed so remain on the computer which is so easy to clear by mistake.

Kate's journals

In one way, I’m offering a lot to anyone wanting to trace my life as I’ve kept journal on and off since I was eleven. They will be able to get a good understanding of my school days, a fair understanding of my university days and a poor understanding of my working life because I have written less frequently over the last few years. So perhaps it isn’t that great a record after all.

Of course we don’t know what the future will hold, digital storage could be in a completely different format meaning everything currently stored on computers or on the web becomes obsolete as has happened with other technologies such as cassette tapes. Or perhaps sites like Facebook will be the future for tracing a family tree and 100 years after the creation of the account they will be opened for public searching as the census is now.  ... Read more 334 words, 2 images