An effective article is an article that achieves its goal. Now, that goal can be anything: To entertain, inform, or persuade someone to act.

The reason every piece of writing needs a purpose is that it’s difficult to get someone’s attention. If a reader clicks your article (which is already rare), you have barely 15 seconds to hold their attention.

You can say the same thing about emails or text messages. Just look at how you respond to any written form of communication.

When an email doesn’t instantly grab your attention, you probably won’t even open it, right? Same thing with everything else on the internet. When you write effective texts, you’re always aware of the fact that most people will probably never even start reading your stuff.

But that doesn’t mean effective writing is only about grabbing people’s attention. If that were the case, you could only write outrageous headlines. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is to grab someone’s attention and hold it. 

I’m not really a fan of journaling prompts because it’s turned into a gimmick. Every journaling app or article about the topic uses them. And people come up with the weirdest prompts. 

It almost seems like they think you need to trick people into writing more. But a person who believes in the power of writing doesn’t need to be seduced to write more. 

However, writing doesn’t always happen by itself. Sometimes we need to give ourselves a little push to get started. And that’s how I use journaling prompts.

I stick to prompts that trigger self-reflection—and I stick to a small list of questions that I keep repeating to myself. That’s the secret of journaling. It’s useless to journal once or twice a year. The purpose of journaling is to track your progress over a period.