Keeping a diary

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

My phone offered to show me what I had been doing exactly three years earlier. There were six photographs of a restaurant meal and none of the conversation that had kept us at the table until closing. The record was accurate in the narrowest possible way. We had eaten those dishes. We had also disagreed, laughed, apologised and missed the last bus, all of which had failed to arrange themselves attractively on a plate. I bought a notebook the following afternoon, suspicious of my sudden belief that paper would make me a more attentive person.

At first I wrote as though a future reader were marking the work. Every ordinary day needed a conclusion. Rain became an occasion for reflection; buying washing powder threatened to become a lesson about domestic life. After a week, I began recording fragments instead: the exact phrase a friend used, a noise outside the window, something I could not explain. The entries grew less polished and more recognisable. A day did not have to prove anything before I was allowed to remember it.

I still take photographs, and I do not claim that handwriting preserves the truth untouched. I omit, exaggerate and choose, just as a camera frame does. The notebook's value is that it makes those choices slower. Sometimes I notice what I am leaving out. When I read an entry now, I want it to return a particular afternoon to me, not certify that I spent the afternoon wisely. The diary is useful precisely when it stops auditioning as evidence of an admirable life.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

My dear niece, you ask whether I recommend keeping a journal. I do, provided you do not confuse the possession of a fine blank book with the habit of observing your conduct. I began mine because each week seemed to vanish with its duties either forgotten or imperfectly performed. A brief account at night obliged me to ask where the hours had gone. I could no longer call myself industrious merely because I had felt busy. The page was a less accommodating witness than my own recollection.

Yet severity has its vanities. In my first volume I recorded every small fault at such length that a reader might suppose I had committed nothing but offences. This was another form of self-importance. I had neglected the kindnesses of other people and the ordinary pleasures that made the days bearable. I now set down a conversation or a view beside the work completed and the promises left unfulfilled. Such particulars prevent the journal from becoming a court in which I am both prisoner and judge.

I would not abandon its power to correct me. An old entry has more than once exposed a complaint I had made for months without attempting to change its cause. But correction need not require contempt for the person being corrected. Write plainly, leave room for uncertainty, and remember that your neighbours are not merely supporting characters in your account of yourself. A journal should sharpen your attention to the world as well as to your own habits; otherwise it may preserve every day while narrowing the life within it.

Use the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on keeping a diary and how their methods convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.