Expository Essay...Cont.

Julia, I followed your advice with the two sentences thing. Thank you, I think it does sound better that way. Everyone else - here's more!

You won’t find a more judgmental or more discriminating group than that of teenagers. We hate certain foods and like all manner of strange clothing. We can’t rip ourselves away from inane videos on YouTube, and yet can’t watch a ten-minute video in class for more than five seconds. And, it’s hard to find a more widely scorned activity among this unpredictable group than writing for fun. We’re forced to write all day in school, so who in their right mind would do it willingly?
Of course, writing itself is not actually a bad thing, even if having to do it for school makes it seem so. And, as it turns out, one form of free-writing can be healthy – keeping a journal.
The word “journal” comes from the French word “le jour,” meaning day. The basic idea of one is to write down the daily events of life and reflect on them. The oldest known journals are from the Middle East and Asia, and there are some that have even become famous, such as The Diary of Anne Frank, written during the Holocaust by Anne Frank while in hiding from the Nazis.
Although keeping a journal may seem like a daily hassle instead of daily relief, the latter is much more true than the former. According to James Pennebaker, professor of psychology at the University of Texas, a study has shown that writing down your experiences, especially about emotional upheavals in your life, can be beneficial. For example, documenting these experiences can “enhance immune function, reduce anxiety and depression, improve sleep, and lift performance at school or work” (Words). The study, conducted by the professor himself, had students writing for just 15-20 minutes a day about a traumatic event from their pasts. The students who wrote in their journals about both the facts of the event and the emotions surrounding it experienced the health benefits listed before.
Deb Western, a social worker and lecturer at La Trobe University, has described the effects of writing down your life as relieving, and clarifying. She speaks from personal experience, as she conducted a study among women with depression who kept journals for a set amount of time.
Pennebaker and Western have not been the only ones to investigate this phenomenon. Joshua M. Smyth, who conducted his research at the State University of New York, discovered that keeping a proper journal can reduce the symptoms of chronic illnesses in their writers. Smyth’s subjects were 112 people with asthma or arthritis. After four months of keeping journals, half of the group that expressed their worry over certain events in their lives showed improvement in their conditions. Only a fourth of the people who wrote about “neutral events,” such as their daily routine or plans for the day, experienced any improvement.
Besides being good for your physical health, journal writing is also psychologically healing. For example, Keith Bellinger was in a car crash in 1991 that crushed three vertebrae in his back. He had been keeping a journal before, but totally enveloped himself in the writing as he hadn’t before the accident. He reported that reading his previous entries and adding new ones helped him get a new perspective on his accident and stopped him from wallowing in self-pity. If it weren’t for his journal, he wouldn’t have had the “strength to carry on,” he said. In fact, therapists now recommend what Bellinger did for himself – keeping a journal to explore traumatic events. “Writing acts as
a conduit through which obsessive or negative thoughts find a safe place to rest outside of one’s mind” (Transformative). So, through journaling, patients can find peace in letting out their emotions on paper.