Uncreative Cop-Out.

Firstly, I don’t feel that a lot of creativity was put into these prompts. In reality, there are only 195 topics, seeing as how some prompts are just continuations of the one before it. Hello, DiPrince and Thurston, that’s cheating.

But seriously, some of these exercises are just dull. Unjournaling claims to be challenging, but the prompts that could be labeled as such are just plain irrelevant, annoying and pointless. For example, we are encouraged to “write a three-sentence paragraph about a dog, using no letters of the alphabet that appear before ‘m’” (16). Hm. Are all of these letters disappearing from the English alphabet sometime soon? If I were stranded on a deserted island, I wouldn’t even resort to doing this activity. I understand that the point is to strengthen our vocabulary and thinking skills, but come on. There are better ways of doing this. I saw exercises such as these as colossal brain cell wasters.

I blame my high expectations- I was imagining something of depth and imagination. The prompts within are something for elementary students, such as, “Yankee Doodle went to town, A-riding on a pony. Stuck a feather in his cap and called it ‘macaroni.’ Why on earth would Yankee Doodle call his feather ‘macaroni’? Write a plausible explanation” (17). Sigh. Do I care? I could just explain my theory on the whole matter aloud. This isn’t writing. It’s just stupidity or general ramblings put on the page. It doesn’t encourage me to pick up a pen and start going.

However, I could see struggling writers benefiting from the material DiPrince and Thurston present. Unjournaling focuses on creating characters, and writing to an audience, along with training writers to show and not tell. I can see teachers being able to easily adapt this book to the classroom. Perhaps students who aren’t critical will enjoy it, but in all honesty, if I were given some of these prompts in even middle school, I wouldn’t have done them. To me, there is nothing fun or appealing about writing conundrums in which I am not permitted to use certain letters. Writing is anything but restrictive, and I don’t feel it should be presented as such.