Keeping Your Personal Journal

This is a fine , little, non- pretentious, helpful and insightful book about journal- writing. The author is a person who listens to others, including his own students. They provide him with reasons for their journal-keeping. One says 'diary- keeping is memory-keeping' another speaks of its importance for -self- expression', a third wants to record an experience in order to be tell her children about it. The immortalization, or attempted immortalization effect is also considered. Simons principal precept however is that the journal should be kept in order to please the one who is writing it. His rule is that there are no rules, and that it should be of use in the way its writer needs it to be. As a veteran journal- writer I would point to one other function it has- that of giving meaning to the present moment as we are living it. The very act of writing in itself, journal- writing, or not, is for many of us a way of making meaning in our lives. And the journal is one of the most ready forms for doing this.