This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Journal Writing, Journal Writing Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Sometimes it is nice to be able to find journal entries that were written in the past, but if you haven’t created a way of finding specific entries, you will be searching through many pages for a long time. There is an easy method to catalogue journal entries into a table of contents (TOC) without too much effort.
1. When starting a new journal, leave anywhere from 2 to 3 pages at the beginning of your journal for a table of contents (TOC). (If you have a journal with more than a hundred pages, you may want to leave more pages open.)
2. Excluding the TOC pages, number the rest of your journal pages, at the top or bottom of each page. You can center the page numbers or put them in the corners. Be creative with this. Use a colored pen and write the numbers in calligraphy if you want to.
4. When creating a new journal entry; date it (left or right hand side) and give it a title (centered).
5. In your TOC, on the left hand side, write the page number of the entry you are working on, followed by the title and date (see example).
6. You can even take it a step further and add a one line description below your TOC entry, if you feel you’d like more of a reference about your journal entry.
7. If you have a journal with sections, and you write in your journal in different sections based on a particular subject, you can also split up your TOC into the sections pertaining to your journal topic area.
8. When you have finished filling up a journal (a rare event at my desk), you can place from and to dates on the front cover and spine (if applicable) and a general title (e.g. nature journal, or traveling Europe).
The unique thing about this way of cataloguing entries, is that you have a means of finding entries, and you also have a date reference. You’d be surprised how many years go by and how many journal volumes you can go through. It is cool to wade through old entries and see what types of subjects you were working on. If you are journaling for future generations, they too will have a point of reference for when the piece was written.
