There has been a growing emphasis on the use of diaries and journals by caregivers and people living with dementia as ways to document and understand their lived experiences. Non-literary diaries that act as ledgers and inventories of life can also serve similar functions. We present the case of “Mr. Bennett,” who apparently kept a non-literary journal throughout his adult life and continued this practice as he lived with dementia. We adopt a discourse-level approach to the study of a non-literary journal given us by his family, which is monologic in terms of not expecting responses from any readers beyond himself but dialogic in his use of rhetorical pointing and comments to himself. When monologic, Bennett's notebooks contain personal journals; when dialogic, the entries slide into being personal diaries: the dialogic priming, most frequently marginal for a specific entry, shows Bennett as he is writing/thinking to himself. Indeed, Bennett's use of priming and his occasional hand-drawn illustrations incorporate multimodality into what he must have seen as his private writing.
Davis et al. (Thu,) studied this question.