Free Write Response
Peter Elbow is known for his advocacy of free writing practices and provides the following arguments in his book, Writing with Power (1981):
Freewriting…
- helps students appreciate that writing can be a means of processing that does not always lead to a finished product.
- helps students overcome anxieties by forcing people to get over it and ‘get on with it’.
- helps students understand we can write without thinking like we speak without thinking.
- illuminates that producing writing and revising writing are two different processes and stages.
- helps manage distracting thoughts and feelings.
- forces us to put aside the conscious self, which can help us find and develop our own authentic voices.
Process
- Create a straightforward question or prompt. If done early in the unit, simpler questions can invite a personal response that is less formal and provides students an opportunity to share how they are personally engaging with a work. More cognitively challenging questions can be explored later in the unit.
- Remind students they don’t actually have to write about the question. If something else is on their mind, they can write about that. The goal here is to stimulate or expel thinking. Sometimes giving students the opportunity to get something off their mind will help their focus later in the class.
- Give students 10 minutes to free write.
- Tell students they can save or throw away their writing. They do not have to re-read it.
- Ask students to reflect in pairs, small group, as a class or in their portfolios: What was this process like for you today? This helps students engage in metacognition and understand that freewriting is not a developed skill or goal in and of itself. It’s a process that can help us in many ways; it doesn’t always have to help us with our writing.
Credits
Adapted from: Elbow, Peter, “Freewriting”. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
