Definition:
A record of incidents, experiences, and ideas. See also:
Etymology:
From the Latin, "daily"Examples and Observations:
- "The writer's journal is a record of and workbook for your writing life. It is your repository for bits of experience, observation and thought destined for eventual use in one writing project or another. The entries in a personal journal tend to be abstract, but the entries in a writer's journal should be concrete."
(Alice Orr, No More Rejections. Writer's Digest Books, 2004) - "Curious effect, here in the sanatorium, on Easter Sunday, when people in this (the most expensive) block of 'chalets' mostly have visitors, of hearing large numbers of upper-class English voices. . . . And what voices! A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter abt nothing, above all a sort of heaviness and richness combined with a fundamental ill will."
(George Orwell, notebook entry for April 17, 1949, Collected Essays 1945-1950) - "Many professional writers use journals, and the habit is a good one for anybody interested in writing, even if he or she has no literary ambitions. Journals store perceptions, ideas, emotions, actions--all future material for essays or stories. The Journals of Henry Thoreau are a famous example, as are A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf, the Notebooks of the French novelist Albert Camus, and 'A War-time Diary' by the English writer George Orwell.
"If a journal is really to help you develop as a writer, you've got to do more than compose trite commonplaces or mechanically list what happens each day. You have to look honestly and freshly at the world around you and at the self within."
(Thomas S. Kane, The New Oxford Guide to Writing. Oxford Univ. Press, 1988)
Pronunciation: JUR-nel
Also Known As: notebook, diary, log
