Abstract

Many writing teachers have found free writing useful as a discovery exercise for helping students generate ideas because most students can free write without much effort and can produce a large amount of material as a result. However, because free writing is chaotic by nature and full of unusable material, students often need guidance in extracting what has value. To make free writing, whether focused or unfocused, more useful as a heuristic device, I have devised a series of questions, activities, and guidelines, a few based on ideas from James Moffett, to serve as a set of exercises for working with free writings so that students can make them even more productive and generative. Students can apply one appropriate activity from the list below to their initial free writings, or they can systematically try all that apply to see which prove most helpful in providing additional material for a first draft: