unjournaling

I thought the unjournaling exercises were great! It is a fun way to get you thinking about writing. There were so many prompt choices. I liked prompt number 162. It asked you to write a short story using the letters of the alphabet in order to start each sentence. It really made you think about what words you could use to start each sentence. I thought it would be hard to come up with words that start with v, x, and z. If I couldn’t think of something, I usually just used a person’s name. To my surprise, my story actually made sense.

I also wrote about someone being bored. This was prompt number 12. There were certain words that were not allowed to be used. After I was done writing, I looked in the back of the book to see the example for the prompts. The example in the back of the book was very similar to my description of someone being bored. I am not sure I like that there are examples in the back. I know they said the examples were there so we knew that each exercise was possible to complete, but I don’t think they were necessary.

Some of the prompts given might be good topics for free writing exercises. Other topics wouldn’t work so well. For example, the prompts that I wrote about might become difficult to keep writing. I had to stop and think about what word I was going to use to start the sentence. Free writing is all about not stopping. The first topic I wrote about would work for free writing. There were a few words that were not allowed to be used, but that didn’t stop me from free writing.

Unjournaling is probably appealing to most kids. I think it would make kids excited about writing. I don’t remember doing silly writing exercises in school. It would have made writing much more interesting if we would have had them. Writing should be fun. It shouldn’t be something that everyone dreads. These exercises show that writing isn’t always boring and tedious.