TheWritersBag.com

A woman who recently lost her husband in a car accident takes pen in hand and begins writing. She writes for hours without stopping. She writes the following day and the day after that. She screams her pain and outrage onto the paper. She transubstantiates her tears into ink and weeps them onto page after page of her journal. Soon the journal becomes a refuge where she is visited by increasingly long and deep moments of peace.

A 16-year-old boy feels unloved by parents and friends. He finds a notebook and starts slashing his anger and loneliness onto its pages. He exhausts himself with the white-hot energy of his writing and from those moments of weariness he sees his life and relationships more clearly and begins to heal.

An executive at the top of his corporate game realizes he has spent his life fighting his way to the top of a pile of refuse. Deadened by the weight of what he feels is a misspent life, he carves an hour a day out of his schedule to record his thoughts and feelings into a journal. His words and phrases paint a canvas of deep disappointment and depression. But soon something more emerges in them – a road map to what could be a new and meaningful life.

Writing is therapy. Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Taking the time to honestly document your soul on paper is a powerful form of self-examination. It heals. It guides. It calms. It helps make life worth living.

I know this is true. Every day – sometimes several times a day – I take a pen and notebook and simply write. I always use a specific type of pen and a Moleskine notebook because they enhance the experience. I get in a quiet place to write, but if I can’t, I quiet my mind before I begin. This is not difficult. The act of writing forces me to slow down, concentrate, focus and center myself – whether I’m on a mountain peak or in an airport.

What do I write? Whatever I want to write. Whatever my soul tells me to write. I write thoughts and ideas. I jot down what I’ve done that day. I like that because it forces me to analyze how I spend myself and on what. Beyond that, I sometimes ask myself questions. Like what is bothering me and what I should do about it. Or what I’m grateful for. Or what I can do for the people I love. And so on.

Do I write in my journal every day? You bet. When I committed to making daily journal entries, I thought it would be difficult and require serious discipline to pull off. After doing it for a while it became as easy as breathing. I now feel I would suffocate if I didn’t do it. In short, I don’t do it because I should – I do it because I love doing it. It has become a non-negotiable part of my life.

There is power, healing and guidance in writing. Reflective writing has become my therapist and counselor of choice, and I know I am not alone in this. I believe we humans are enough alike that everyone can reap the same benefits.

Including you.

We’ve discussed semicolons before, but when I read what Bill Walsh, of the Washington Post, said about them, I knew I had to take another shot. In his book, Lapsing Into a Comma, he wrote:

The semicolon is an ugly bastard, and thus I tend to avoid it.

This is what I’ve always wanted to say about semicolons. But I’ve never managed to say it with such eloquence. Thank you, Bill.

Is there even the slightest place in the written language for the semicolon? Lamentably, yes. If you’re cruising along writing a sentence that contains a series of things, and at least one of those series contains a comma, use a semicolon for clarity’s sake. Like this:

• Joe jumped over the fence; kissed Jill, Stephanie and Ann; and ran off laughing.

There is another acceptable use for a semicolon, but I personally don’t think it holds water. I’m referring to the rule that states you can use one to join two related sentences together without a conjunction. For example …

• I reached the cliff and looked down; what I saw terrified me.

I believe sentences like that are better off split into two. In fact, I’ve run into very few sentences that have been glued together with these ugly little punctuation marks that wouldn’t have been improved by chopping them neatly in two at the semicolon.

When writing a person’s age, my first suggestion is to exercise extreme caution.

Someone who has spent a fortune to look 40 and wants people to think she is 30 is not likely to thank you when you tell the world she is 50.

My next suggestion is more technical: Always use numerals to indicate a human’s or animal’s age, rather than spelling the number out.

Actually, this isn’t a suggestion. It’s a hard and fast rule, according to The Associated Press Stylebook. But you only have to remember it when referring to ages less than 10, since, as you already know, you should use numerals for numbers above nine anyway, only spelling them out if they are below 10 (with several exceptions, which we’ve addressed in another article). Let’s look at a few examples….

RIGHT: Bobby is 7 years old.
WRONG: Bobby is seven years old.

RIGHT: Janey is a 5-year-old rock star.
WRONG: Janey is a five-year-old rock star.

RIGHT: They were all in their 20s.
WRONG: They were all in their twenties.

RIGHT: Johnny is 7 and Susie is 5.
WRONG: Johnny is seven and Susie is five.

One last point: Notice the previous two sentences. When the context of a sentence doesn’t require the word “years” or the phrase “years old,” it is presumed that the number refers to years of age and not the person’s weight, IQ or number of inner demons.