Diary and journal

A diary or journal is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. Such logs play a role in many aspects of human civilization, including governmental, business ledgers, and military records. In more personal diaries, the writer may detail crushes or complaints.

The history of Diary

The word diary comes from the Latin diarium ("daily allowance", from dies, "day", more often in the plural form diaria). The word journal comes from the same root (diurnus, "of the day") through Old French jurnal (modern French for day is jour).
The oldest extant diaries come from East Asian cultures, pillowbooks of Japanese court ladies and Asian travel journals being some of the oldest surviving specimens of this genre of writing. The 9th century scholar Li Ao, for example, kept a diary of his journey through southern China.
Sales of "page a day" diaries go back hundreds of years (Letts, for example, is over 200 years old). At first, most of these books were used as ledgers, or business books. Samuel Pepys is the earliest diarist who is well-known today, although he had contemporaries who were also keeping diaries, such as John Evelyn. Pepys also was apparently at a turning point in diary history, for he took it beyond mere business transaction notation, into the realm of the personal.
Until, it seems, around the turn of the 20th century, with greater literacy and industrialization throughout the globe, particularly the Western world, diary writing was mostly limited to the members of the higher social classes. In the West, at least, a high proportion of historical and literary figures from the Renaissance to the 20th century seem to have kept a diary.
Tristine Rainer's 1978 The New Diary expanded awareness of diary-keeping as a literary genre, particularly among feminists. Acknowledging key figures in the resurgence of diary writing such as Carl Jung, Marion Milner, Ira Progoff and Anaïs Nin, she identified techniques that people use either spontaneously or have employed in their daily writing to explore themselves and their experience of the world. Rainer's idea, as expressed in the title, is that a diary is much more than a dry record of weather or daily events—it allows the writer to communicate deep and often spiritual realizations. Social historians were particularly interested in this, as it expanded greatly the number of historical texts available to them.
In the United States during the 1990s, various K-12 educators used a variety of journals across subject areas to encourage and document student progress, including pre-literate picture journals and "math journals" to aid in developing mathematical concepts in an individualized way, in accordance with Lev Vygotsky's concepts of instructional scaffolding. Another popular adaptation of the diary is the personal use of time management tools such as the Filofax or Franklin Planner.

My view on diary is that diary is something personal that is not meant for other people's reading..Dr Edwin has introduced to me some of the famous diaries that has been published. These diaries are quite interesting but as we are already informed, diaries are only meant for our own personal understanding. Some of the diaries are quite hard to understand as we are not familiar with the situation.