Which is Better: A Diary or a Journal?

When it comes to recording your thoughts, experiences, and ideas, there are two main options: a diary or a journal. While they may seem similar, there are some key differences between the two. A diary is typically used for introspective and reflective purposes, while a journal is more often used for creative purposes. Journals are not structured when you buy them, so you can add any structure you want.

If you're serious about journaling, it's best to use a specific journaling application like Day One or a password-protected file on your computer. Journals help us organize our thoughts and make them understandable. You can record daily events, thoughts and feelings about certain experiences or opinions. Journey allows you to tag and archive your journal entries.

A magazine is usually a little more nebulous and informal, a place to jot down ideas, objectives, random thoughts, etc. When they Google the famous diary of Anne Frank, 8,100 people search for the term “Diary of Anne Frank” per month, instead of the 110 people who search for “Diary of Anne Frank” on Google. However, according to some estimates, a diary refers to a place to record a certain kind of thinking. There is a lot of overlap between a diary and a journal, but a diary is not necessarily a synonym of journal. Nautical diaries are an example of this; they track positions, winds, wave heights and currents which are not really events of a personal nature.

According to Google's literature database, the word “diary” is used about twice as often as the word “journal”. The word “magazine” is currently used about 0.0021% of the time in this Google dataset. When deciding which one to use for your own purposes, consider how specific you want to record from daily life. If you're writing a book on a challenging topic, you can use the journal to explore the idea and your thoughts on it. For example, when I was training for the Dublin City Marathon a few years ago, I kept a training diary. From what you have described here, it seems that a diary is an explicitly personal documentation of several subjects, where a magazine is more about a singular topic intended for the general public.