August 15, 2012
Articulation - gaining power over words 
A description of the work of articulation taken from the scholarship of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 
-quoted from page 23 in Lessons from Great Lives: learn to be rich in all areas of your life 
by Sterling W. Sill and Dan McCormick 

"As one of his most profitable stimulants (one of the ways he got his mind working), Emerson decided to keep a journal, and once began, he kept it up faithfully. In his journal he wrote down every thought,  every helpful suggestion, and he recorded every success. Each day he collected in his journal his disjointed dreams, his mental reveries. and the fragments of all of the ideas that his mind was able to conceive. The act of writing an idea down improves both the idea and the mind. Bacon said, "Reading makes a full man, but writing makes an exact man." You have to think an idea through before you can write it down. Writing the idea down gives it form, exactness, and makes it visible. When one's ideas can be 
brought under the scrutiny of the eyes, the ideas can be more readily improved. 

(And in this paragraph describes ARTICULATION  personified:)

"Mr. Emerson's journal also became the hive in which he stored the honey of his mind as the bees of his brain produced it. Once his ideas were written down, Emerson could then go back and review them again and again, with the idea of making needed improvements. As he visited with great ideas, every day he grew accustomed to their faces. He discovered among them a great many family resemblances, and some intrriguing future possibilities were suggested. Then he measured their abilities and learned to arrange them a little more attractively. After he improve their dress, brightened their faces, and increased their muscle power, he was able to join them together in a more effective order. Almost always, his ideas came in fragments, but he knew that the missing links would soon show up to make his thoughts complete. 

Once snared by Mr. Emerson, no good idea was ever allowed to get away. He not only wrote it down immediately, but he put it in his mental incubator so the idea itself could grow. He knew that ideas have a natural tendency to propagate. Each idea has the possibility of an extensive posterity and ideas come from parents just as people do. With all of these laws working in  is favor, Emerson became a great, man, a great thinker, a great communicator, and a great writer. His journal was very valuable, and he knew that even his unused thoughts would fit somewhere into an effective pattern of expression." ……

What does this mean to you? Write your thoughts in your own journal.