Sometimes, when you sit down to write your LRN journaling, you might find yourself restrained a little bit by the list. Maybe there’s something—a concern, a new discovery, an unexpected emotion—that’s been rolling around in your thoughts. Or an idea for the way your life’s everyday details interact with something bigger. Or it may even be something you have a hard time saying—but can write about.
Enter the rambling layout.
When you write the journaling for a rambling LRN layout, you might write a lot of journaling. Think of it as a space for expressing a specific emotion that you don’t want to forget. Personally, I often get the urge to write some rambling journaling when my kids are in a transition period in their lives. As I watch them change, or try to help them with their struggles, or praise them for their accomplishments, I find a bunch of words welling up, needing to be recorded. So I write.
I’ve found that it is easiest to say what I really want to say if I start writing as soon as I can once I’ve had that “write this down” impulse. Some of my rambling LRN journaling has been written in my notebook (I have one in every bag I own, so I’m almost never without one), in the “memo” feature of my cell phone, and even once on a paper sack from the grocery store. Just get your thoughts down on paper, then revise and polish them later.
Since you might have a lot of journaling when you ramble, here are a few suggestions for handling it:
Don’t make the font too small. Anything smaller than ten points will probably be difficult to read.
Use a simple, clean font. (Save the cute or fancy ones for smaller journaling bits.)
Revise and delete what you can to shorten the length of the text.
Use columns. They give your text legibility and they allow for a large amount of words. (That’s why newspapers use them!) You can play with your column options—use different widths, or wrap them around something, or cut them apart.
Keep the width of your journaling to five inches or narrower. That will improve legibility, too.
Here’s the LRN layout I made about my son, Jake:
In the journaling, I write about how I am torn: excited to see him on the cusp of teenagehood, but also terrified. I put the text in columns that I printed on different colors of paper to create a sort of frame with the words. The layout captures some of what I feel about both him and myself right now, and I’m happy I got it down on paper!
So, share! What’s been kicking around in your head, waiting to be expressed right now?
