It is a universally acknowledged fact that most teenaged writers write copious amounts of catharsis. Most teenaged brains are full of catharsis, and the stuff has a tendency to flow from one’s brain down through the shoulder and arm and come out of one’s fingertips when least expected. The result of this nervous cathartic river is typically a mindless conglomeration of sentences on the general themes of hopeless misunderstanding and melodramatic despair, punctuated with tear stains and line breaks rather than commas and periods.

Cathartic writing is the type that is meant strictly for both the eyes of the writer alone and the entire world. But what most writers of catharsis fail to recognize is that no one wants to read the dark details of their inner battles: not their friends, not their enemies and certainly not their Tumblr followers. Often it is not till someone says this to the writer’s face that he awakens to the truth and by then he has been at it too long to be able to stop publishing his catharsis and simultaneously preserve his sanity. The typical course of events at this point is that the writer becomes angry, feels betrayed and unappreciated, and subjects his readers to a stream of catharsis so virulent that in a small amount of time he has no readers at all. No one quite knows what happens after this (after all, no one is reading the writer’s thoughts any longer); but it cannot be imagined to be a good thing. Many writers who used to be thought popular and talented fade from memory at this point, merely because they do not know the secret of disguising their catharsis so that others will read it. Cathartic writers do not realize that there is a genre entirely devoted to catharsis. It is called poetry.

Great poetry is catharsis.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are catharsis. Emily Dickinson’s ethereal, dash-uated lines are catharsis. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot is catharsis. Name your favorite poem. It is catharsis.

Someone ought to tell young writers of catharsis to put their angst into well-written poetry. Readers who used to appreciate their bitter musings in prose are guaranteed to appreciate them even more in tastefully divided lines built of multisyllabic words. Compare these two examples:

“I don’t freaking get why she can’t freaking tell me what she was freaking doing at that idiot's house till three a.m.”

“Tell me, O source of all my joy, / Hast thou been faithful to me, thy dearest lover?”

Which would you rather read?