What it meant to keep a journal...

 

 

So for the past months I've been keeping a journal as part of my literature class...Quiet frankly its been a very interesting process. Personally I've never kept a journal be it because I never really found the time to write in one or because id rather talk to someone than actually write down what I'm thinking. However, this experience has turned out to be much more pleasant than expected.

A very unique thing about my journal is that it was personal, from the outside in. My outside cover, as well as that of my classmates, was completely covered in pictures and quotes that basically speak to the kind of person that I am or of what truly interest me and or defines me. I think it was both fun and quirky for our professor to have us do that as it also made us as classmates get to know each other better. Our professor set up some guidelines for us in the beginning that we had to follow to the best of our abilities. This I must admit was one of the harder parts of the journal as a whole. The main difficulty I had with them was the fact the we had to basically disregard grammar and spelling and just keep our hand moving and letting our ideas flow. This to me was very hard because I would always be thinking that I had to disregard spelling therefore every spelling mistake that I would make I would stop at, think about and then reluctantly move on from. It was easier as I got the hang of it but it was almost always in the back of my mind, making the process a little hard for me. However, the fact that we had a 'time limit' of ten minutes per writing session, I thought was very useful in a way. In my experience I found that the ten minutes was not only a good and or convenient allotted time for witting but also that whenever I knew I had something to write about, the fact that I just had ten minutes to write about it made me completely forget about spelling and whatnot making me concentrate only on what I was writing about and as one of our other guidelines said I would 'go for the jugular' of what I was writing.

In a nutshell I managed to complete 45 journal entries in this semester. Much more than I have managed to come up with in my whole life. Because of this experience I have learned not only the benefits of keeping one and jotting down ideas, thoughts and feelings but also expanding my writing capabilities in general. In my journal I would write to myself, another person or to an audience; I learned to clear my head and write what was really important and I learned about myself as a writer. All in all this experience as helped me gain a lot and I hope to continue it in the future.