Say what you mean--

and mean what you say...

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”

― Kurt Vonnegut

One of the great ironies of education is the HUGE emphasis that is put on the writing of essays--as if life without essays is unthinkable. And it actually is unthinkable as long as we live in a world of thinkers.

Yet we (us teachers) rarely assign “essay reading” to our students; instead, we have them read great poetry, and great short stories and great books--“the good stuff “that will help nurture the love for great literature... but essays? No way. Too boring. Too opinionated. Too whatever. Show me a good one that some disenchanted teenager will read and enjoy, and I’ll show you a...

Making an Essay Out of a Journal Entry...

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

—George Orwell

      Somebody once told me that you can't make chicken salad out of chicken manure. I agree, but not wholeheartedly, for many times I find myself crafting essays out of even my most pitiful journal entries--probably because my journal is like a messy bedroom: I know what's in there, but sometimes it is hard-to-find what I need when I need it. My thoughts are scattered like dirty socks. My best ideas are somewhere under the bed, and that nifty scene about courage in the face of adversity is probably in the wash already.

But no worries, for like my bedroom--my journal is mine. Somehow I will find my best ideas, my way-cool phrasings--and even whole paragraphs that I can wear to school and call my essay.

The First Step

A journey into the world of blogging...

     So you have written a cool journal entry; you have taken that raw material and formed it into an essay with a unifying theme of some sort, a cool beginning paragraph (set the scene & state the theme), split everything else into paragraphs--and maybe even added a conclusion. Hopefully, you proofread it a zillion times and fixed every error you could find.

Now what?

Thoughts on Journaling

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand oursleves.

~Henry David Thoreau

     We are what we are and we are what we put into words. More so than anything we discover who we are through the process of putting substance to the ether of thought.

On most nights, after the work and play of the day; after the kids have stopped homework, chores and Fortnite, I come here to this chair, open my Day One app--and start writing, usually with no set plan other than to simply write, and in writing maybe discover a bit more of who I am, what I care about, and why I am.

I am rarely amazed by what I write, but I never cease to be amazed. It is never wasted time; it is life added to the day--energy created by expending energy, a cool twist to the laws of physics.