Journalling Prompts to Improve Your Writing
A wonderful tertiary benefit of journalling – besides allowing you to take stock of your life and being a wonderful way of self-preservation – is that it lets you to practice your writing skills without even realising. I’m a writer by trade, so perhaps I’m biased, but I really believe that writing is not only a beautiful art, but essential in good, everyday conversation and communication.
I wanted to share just a handful of prompts that can help you to improve your writing through the practice of journalling. Perhaps in time you’ll become an even better storyteller, or express yourself more fully, or become more creative in the way you construct sentences and stories, formulate emails and everyday conversations, conjure blog posts and beyond.
- Challenge yourself: start your entries without using ‘I’, ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’, or ‘I’m’.
- Choose one moment from your day, and recount it in detail. This way, it becomes a story of its own.
- What is one standout sentence, phrase or anecdote that made an impact on you? Why? Write the story of what happened afterwards, or how it changed you.
- Try out a new style. If you usually write ‘to yourself’, try writing as though there’s a real reader. Or, you could even try writing your day’s entry as a fairytale, a historical fiction, a sci-fi novel! Play around and have some fun. You’ll find new perspectives and writing practice.
- Pick a book at random, and flip the pages until your finger lands on a word. Use this as your prompt. Perhaps it becomes the topic, or perhaps the word becomes your entry starter.
