The Blog & the Journal - Writing About You -

By Cecilia Tanner

The BLOG & the JOURNAL explores the fascination of keeping a journal which is the very fascination of life, - its novelty, its unpredictability, its new twists. By expressing yourself in your solitude, you can digest these ever-changing influences in your life and move on a wiser person. The many functions of the journal are discussed, and there are many exercises to help your writing shine a little brighter.

People have been writing in journals for thousands of years - literally. Amenhotep IV in ancient Egypt may be the earliest recorded observer of his own life, followed by so many wise people ever since. The journal process may have been a contributing factor to their enduring contribution to the world.

Journal writing and the newest form, the Blog, is the expression of you in the celebration of your life in reflective solitude. This writing about you helps you understand yourself and that helps you understand much more about others.

It's a growth experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9780987928313

Book preview

review.

What is the blog?

The blog can be a corporate webpage that communicates directly with the reader, but more often is your own personal newspaper, reporting your take on the current events, on people in the news, on music, art, on just about everything. The latest comment appears on top of the page.

Some personal blogs are themed on a single subject, such as sailboats or chrysanthemums or Mexican vacations. But just as often they are simply online journals.

Unlike websites, most good Blogs are interactive, inviting your readers to respond to your ideas, thus also functioning as a social network. Many bloggers have set themselves up as critics; food critics, movie critics, and so on.

(Microblogging consists of very short comments.)

The beauty of the blog is that you don’t have to meet some editor’s rejection or biases. You can sport your own style, dancing on the digital highway to your own drumbeat.

Many blogs have become established sources of information, virtual newspapers like the Huffington Post with thousands of readers every day. The Huffington Post starts with the big full width headline story and with three columns below. The left column has the feature article with featured Posts below that are comments sent in by readers. The middle column is photos of news items and other topical interests, and the third column is social news, the arts, the music, the entertainment items. The layout is exceptional with lots of pictures and color.

But for most bloggers, the Blog is a very informal personal affair, with comments, photos, information, solutions to problems, recipes or car repairs. The nature of the content is infinite. We may not anticipate that the information we have to share will be exactly what someone else needs, but many times when one Googles for information, the search engine will find the search words in your content, and you will meet someone else’s needs.

Say you search how to fix my Bayliner fridge; the search may find in the content of someone’s blog in Ireland, fixing my Bayliner fridge. And if you are in Fiji, you can benefit from that person in Ireland who has succeeded in solving your problem.

Often to find this type of special information, a searcher will use the Deep Web, using the search engines that can search for deep content like www.searchenginewatch.com or www.bing.com or medical engines like Mednar or PubMed.

Blogs need a platform on the Web to upload your Blog. And there are many free platforms that you can use, most are oriented to the special purpose of the blogger.

//livejournal.com is primarily for blogs and journal postings. Has more than 19M blogs and journals on the Web.

//blogger.com is Google’s blog platform and is very popular.

//www.tumblr.com features mostly micro-blogging for posting short messages like tweets on Twitter.

//wordpress.com is mostly for professionals and forbids the placement of ads etc.

and there is //www.posterous.com, //bravenet.com and many others to choose from.

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As in writing any journal, there are better ways to write them. And the purpose of the journal/blog dictates largely how you will write them. Fiction is crafted in a deliberate direction, but the journal unfolds unpredictably with reversals, and shocks and all manner of unexpected changes. And this makes journals fascinating to read.

In Arthur Ponsonby’s ground-breaking recognition of the journal genre in the 1920s, he even picked the top nine diarists and discussed their merits.

Unlike Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebooks, which Lessing said are made up from beginning to end, the corporate blog is all about authenticity and transparency and honesty. There have been several corporate blogs that thought to be cheeky and edgy but were found to be deceitful, and the companies were held up to considerable shame.

But the personal blog seems to be anything the blogger chooses, fiction or non-fiction, usually a conscientious sharing of the writers bon mots and bon thoughts revealing only what they want to reveal.

When creating the public work, however, some attention should be paid to making it entertaining, making it interesting, giving it better readability. And a work is interesting if you strive for honesty rather than artifice, incorporating your own sense of value, be it brute revelation or tender beauty.

All the suggestions throughout this book apply to the writing of an effective journal or blog. You will want to have style and eloquence, and style is always found in one’s cleanest truest expression of self, and eloquence, though it may sound 20th Century, is simply the powerful use of language.

Developing Flexibility With Words

The words, the words, Boss.

Eloquence consists of the fluency and power of the use of language, and, to write more effectively, it is all about the words and the sentences.

Take the sounds of the words next to each, the rhythm of the words in a sentence, such as when thinking of peace:

We had a dream, and now it seems, we dream no more.

Da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah.

There are many other rhythms, da-da-dah, da-da-dah, and so on.

This line about peace also has assonance, the rhyming and repetition of the vowel sounds in dream, seems and dream.

The triad is a strong form of expression:

I see, I do, I learn.

Eat, Pray, Love.

The cover of my dictionary also testifies to this:

..the dictionary is a vital reference tool for home, school and office. It is the perfect size for a briefcase, schoolbag or desktop.

The use of alliteration is a joy to read, using the same sound at the start of some words in the same sentence:

"We woke to the sun squeezing in around the shutters,

and the waves smashing against the shore."

Use metaphors, but with taste and not too many. If you have heard the comparison before–it was raining cats and dogs–it is a cliché and must be avoided. The metaphor must be appropriate, not too far-fetched. The metaphor and simile have a whole chapter later in this book.

And, always, remember the five senses to make the mental picture as vivid as possible: sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. We learn and we remember through all five senses, and by including references to as many of the senses as possible, your writing is more vivid and memorable. We tend to exclude all but the sight. For example;

The rain fell on the corrugated roof,

could be The rain drummed a sharp staccato on the grey metal of the roofs, the dampness permeating our felt coats making us smell like wet dogs.

The meaning of the words

You have to know the definition of the words you use to convey the most information. If you aren’t sure what the words mean that you use, the reader certainly will not understand your intentions.

A joke was going around about the person who exclaimed that they didn’t think the pope was invaluable [infallible]. And the former US President’s take on nucular [nuclear] war was scoffed at for years.

And if you use the word geek and you think you are talking about a person focused on their computers, someone else may think a nerd is that person of superior computer skills and higher academics, while a geek, to them, is a socially inept person. If the meaning will cause confusion find a different way to explain yourself.

Hug your dictionary. Spellcheck doesn’t pick up the words like invaluable that you may be misusing.

Using words like impact does not convey any information. Is the impact good or bad? The reader doesn’t know and wastes time searching the sentences for a clue. Why not just say bad effect or good effect?

I have seen writers use allow for two and even three times in a sentence and each time it allowed for a different meaning. Avoid the meaningless construction.

Getting content

Sometimes you don’t know how to get started. You know you have things to say but nothing is coming off the keyboard.

And, too often, you write something, and then after it is posted or responded to, you think of something so clever that you should have included. Going for content first will help get to many more ideas than you find otherwise–with fewer regrets later.

There are techniques to putting a direct line through to the language center of your brain, using lists, clusters, mind-mapping or webbing, to name a few.

You can start by just playing with words on a page.

Free writing is letting the words pour forth; simply writing any word, and then the next word comes undirected, whether it relates to the first word or not. As Louis Lamour wrote,

Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

Describe noses all over the page, or warts you’ve known and loved or a crooked tooth, whatever. Enjoy the words; make them say things, wonderful things, very bad disgusting things, special things, colorful things, written sideways, up and down, in circles or any way you like. Just loosen up and fling words around as a warm up.

Lists

Another method of getting content is simply writing lists. They can be lists of single words, a phrase or a line spreading into a paragraph if that happens. And I find that my lists almost always turn into phrases and later into paragraphs.

For example, here is a list that students wrote thinking they had nothing to say about the fog on the water.

Fog on the Water

Gloomy, stillness, gray, ominous,

moist, bulrushes, muffling, London,

light house, wet, ethereal, ghost ship,

romantic, whisper, islands, eerie, foghorns,

Scotland, early morning, muffling,

not navigable, bridges, dead sounds,

damp blankets, nothing, rolling in,

canoe paddling, rocking, morning,

back alleys, fishy smells, gondolas,

whisper, swampland, chilled to the bone,

click of a boot heel, morning runs,

ringing brass on boats,

detective/spy story,

lost sense of reality,

sun rays shoot through,

Loch Ness monster,

suspended in time, smell of salt air.

warm fire & books

Try writing any words you can about a color of your choice. You could write as if you are explaining the color to someone who is color blind, or just address the color you particularly love or hate. We react rather strongly to color so the words are not too hard to find. Keep in mind the 5 senses as you should in everything you write: taste, touch, sight, sound and smell. We perceive everything using these five senses, so to make an idea vivid, cover the 5 senses. What does red taste like?

Here is a student paragraph on blue:

"Blue is cool, cold, icy, yet soft and light. Blue tastes cool and spicy peppermint. Blue is both a stream trickling down a mountain and the hollow loneliness of the far reaches of space. To feel blue is sadness, quiet, subtle, subdued, yet can also be cheerful happy people in a snow fight. To see