Writing A Diary Entry
Diary Writing is said to have originated more than a 1000 years ago. The diaries of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank have given the world invaluable information about the English Restoration and the Nazi Holocaust respectively. Diary Writing is now an immensely popular habit throughout the world and an exercise for the elementary school children.
A Diary is a personal record of daily events and feelings usually written on daily basis. It is easy to write a great diary entry if we follow a few simple steps.
• First Person: The Diary entry should be on first person narrative as it is you who writes your own daily life and feelings
• Record of Life: The Diary entry should contain the events and occurrences of the day on which you write. It is not necessary to include as much as you can write. Rather it will be a good idea to write down only those things you want to remember about later.
• Feelings and Emotions: A diary is the repository of one's own emotions. A diary entry can include the mood of the day, the joy, sadness, triumphs... all that you want to write.
• Diary, your Companion: A diary entry is where you can write as you would talk to your closest friend or companion. It is a place for all your feelings that you haven't even shared with anyone else.
• Strictly No Rules: There are no rules for the structure of a diary entry. There are conventions that you can follow. A diary entry can usually be written in your own style whatever it is. It can be crisp and short forms and ungrammatical expressions are viable in a diary entry.
• Natural: Writing the diary entry is seen as a natural activity that is flexible and subjective. Simple and incomplete sentences and use of jargons are usual in writing a diary to make it as truthful to the life. Colloquial and informal words are common in a diary entry.
Structure of a Diary
• A diary entry is usually brief and has simple structure. A diary entry is perfect to start with the date of the day on which it is written. The date helps the writer to recollect incidents in a later reading of the entry.
• The diary entry is often not a neatly written paragraph. Similar to the stream of consciousness technique in literature, a diary entry is of broken sentences and short paragraphs. The events recorded would not always be in a sequential order but in an order that the writer thinks it best reflects his emotional attachment with those events.
• Ellipses, question marks and exclamation marks are usually seen in a diary. Ellipses indicate that the diary is incomplete and only the important parts of an event or incident is written. The question marks are used to reiterate the doubts and questions that rises in the mind of the diary writer in that day. Subsequently exclamation marks help to record surprises, joy and similar feelings.
• It is important to remember that a diary entry is a poetic representation of a day in the life of the diary writer. It is not an entity that is complete in itself but just a part of the diary. Hence, it is best to write about the hope and expectation for the days after the date of diary in the entry. The next entry will be a continuation of the entry just like this one was a continuation of the previous one.
• Always write a short, simplified and compressed diary entry because we are sure that no one wants to read so much from one’s own diary. Just hint about the important occurrences of the day which you think you would be happy to read again.
Sample of a Diary Entry
