How Do You Journal?

Journaling is a very personal thing and there are many ideas of how to journal.

1. Write a “Dear Diary” type of journal where you write as though you are telling someone else your story.  This gives an easy starting point for some people who have trouble getting the first few sentences going.
2. Bullet Point: You can keep it short and sweet, perhaps writing the positives and negatives that occurred that day and your thoughts or feelings about them.
3. Just write.  No one else is going to read your journal unless you share it with them, so you can use incomplete sentences, and your sentences don’t have to flow from topic to topic.  You are not being graded on this activity.  If you feel that your journal would not be private, you can journal on the computer using a Microsoft word document.  You are able to secure those with a password, so you can feel that your journaling will truly be private.
4. Include a picture from a magazine or an actual picture that you took to describe your day or your feelings about the day.  A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
5. There is NO right or wrong way to journal.  You can use loose pieces of paper, you can staple them or fold them together, you can use a composition book (cost is usually less than $2) or you can go out and get an actual journal/diary.  The point is to start.  It’s the process of writing that is helpful, not how pretty it looks or how grammatically correct it is.

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