Work & Academics

Goodbye “Dear Diary” and hello “Development Diary”

Many people can be a bit intimidated by the thought of diary writing. A large part of this is the recollection of childhood diary writing experiences filled with mundane details which look something like:

Dear Diary,
Today I got up at 6:30 and had five idli for breakfast. Then I went to the tea shop and had two cups of tea and …

You get the point. No one—not even you—is likely to want to read or re-read those words a month later.

So, why are we asking you to keep a “Development Diary” then¹?
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1. This document was prepared for Tata-Dhan Academy students who are completing the fieldwork or development practice segments of their curriculum. As such, some of the content specifically highlights the types of topics they would be recording about their experiences. [back]

I couldn’t help it. I had to start writing my own writing guide based on a few of the things that really irritate me when I’m editing or correcting something for someone else. It’s a work in progress and it’s being done somewhat haphazardly (which probably means that I’m eventually going to get lazy about it after a while and not add new tips). But I’m having fun doing it—it helps relieve some of the frustration I sometimes feel when editing….

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Introduction

Process documentation and journal writing should become a natural extension of the work that you do while you are in the field. Both of these types of writing are meant to describe what happened in the field, and both of them will include different kinds of information to help you later on when writing your reports. But while these writing tasks are related, they are different in their purposes. Broadly speaking, process documentation is purely objective, while journal writing is more flexible and allows for more subjective commentary. The following document was written to help you get started with process documentation and journal writing¹. I urge you to take the included information as “guidelines” and not as a prescriptive set of rules or requirements.
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1. This document was prepared for Tata-Dhan Academy students who are completing the fieldwork or development practice segments of their curriculum. As such, some of the content specifically highlights the types of topics they would be recording about their experiences. Nevertheless, whatever your course of study—or indeed even if you are writing for pleasure!—many of the concepts here should still be easily applicable. [back]

A colleague wrote: I am attempting to do this project, but I have absolutely NO CLUE what I’m doing. I’m trying to use Microsoft Access to create a database, and I’ve even looked at a tutorial online. I’m just not sure if the information we’ve been instructed to put on there should go on a Table or Query or what!!! I’m sooo frustrated. I don’t know how to do this. HELP! Someone! Anyone! This is the only computer application that I’ve never used, and I am so confused.

I’ll try to help. Step-by-step, just to be on the safe side. (Sorry, I didn’t bother to make it pretty…) Targeted towards Access beginners like myself….

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