It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. There's a saying that goes, always leave a note.

Today's talk from the writer Sakina Hoffler is an expansion on that idea. It's about the power of

bearing witness by writing things down. And she walks us through how to do it. By the end of her

2020 talk from TEDxU of Cincinnati, she shows us how how to do it. By the end of her 2020 talk from TEDxU of Cincinnati,

she shows us how effective this can be

by sharing a very personal story of her own.

Have you ever seen something?

And you wish you could have said something,

but you didn't?

A second question I have is, has something ever happened to you?

You never said anything about it, though you should have.

I'm interested in this idea of action, of the difference between seeing something which

is basically passively observing in the actual act of bearing witness.

Bearing witness means writing down something you have seen, something you have heard, something

you have experienced.

The most important part of bearing witness

is writing it down. It's recording. Writing it down captures the memory. Writing it down

acknowledges its existence. One of the biggest examples we have in history of someone bearing witness is Anne Frank's

diary. She simply wrote down what was happening to her, her family about her confinement. And in doing so,

we have a very intimate record of this family during one of the worst periods of our world's history.

And I want to talk to you today about how to use creative writing to bear a witness.

And I'm going to walk you through an exercise, which I'm going to do myself,

...