by Jessica Sumalpong, Free Right

 1. Elbow, Peter. "Freewriting." Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. pp. 1-7. Print. 

Peter Elbow claims that regularly practicing free writing is the most effective way he knows to improve one’s writing. The practice, as he describes it, is “simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty)” with the only real requirement being “that you never stop”.  While this can be a somewhat chaotic practice, he claims its usefulness lies in that free writing does not allow one to edit his or herself as he or she is writing. While Elbow says that editing “is usually necessary if we want to end up with something satisfactory”, it is when “that editing goes on at the same time as producing” that one’s work becomes hindered in some way.

            A benefit Elbow proposes writing has over speaking is that “writing has the advantage of permitting more editing”, and yet he also claims “that’s its downfall too”. While schooling makes us consistently try to edit out grammar or spelling errors, this process of automatic editing will also inadvertently cause us to “edit unacceptable thoughts and feelings”. This kind of “compulsive, premature editing”, according to Elbow, “makes writing dead” because it distorts one’s voice with “interruptions, changes, and hesitations between the consciousness and the page”. He concludes by saying that allowing one’s natural voice to come through his or her writing, which one can practice through free writing, allows one’s voice to come through one’s writing stronger. 

2. Marcus, Stephen. "Any Teacher a Writing Teacher? The Value of "Free Writing""JSTOR. Taylor & Francis Group, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.           <http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jstor.org.proxy.library.ucsb.edu%3A2048%2Fstable%2Fpdfplus%2F27565338.pdf%3F%26acceptTC%3Dtrue%26jpdConfirm%3Dtrue>.

Stephen Marcus discusses a concern he has often heard amongst faculty and teaching assistants of various disciplines, being that students display an unsatisfactory level of writing in their exams and papers. While this problem is often overlooked because it’s often believed that it is an English instructor and an English course’s job to improve a student’s writing, Marcus names free writing as an exercise through which teachers or any discipline can  “do something to improve their students’ writing skills” which also doesn’t “involve sacrificing class time to teach something else (“English”)”. He then goes on to list suggested activities that instructors and can use or modify in order to fit their course topic and needs.

            After listing these proposed activities, Marcus begins a discussion on free writing itself, naming it as a practice that “has long been advocated in English education” as it “aids in students’ becoming more fluent, in discovering their own writing voice, in topic selection, and in freeing them from premature edition of ideas or expression”. However, using the practice outside of an English classroom can still prove to be beneficial to students since it “provide[s] occasions which serve not only to help make the student master of a significant portion of his or her own verbal world, but to reinforce the knowledge of a particular subject matter”. 

3. Reynolds, Mark. "Make Free Writing More Productive." College Composition and Communication 39.1 (1988): 81-82. JSTOR. Web. 17 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/357825?ref=no-x-route:52267fcff6c139e8c38cf1cf8e335171>.

Mark Reynolds names free writing as useful process to students because it helps students “generate ideas” and also “because students can free write without much effort and can produce a large amount of material as a result”. He admits though that the process is chaotic and often produces “unusable material”, which is why students “often need guidance in extracting what has value”. Based on his own ideas as well as those from James Moffett, Reynolds lists twenty questions, activities, and guidelines “to serve as a set of exercises for working with free writings so that students can make them even more productive and generative”. However, upon reading this list, it is clear that these exercises are not solely advantageous to a student but would also prove useful in giving anyone the most out of their time spent free writing.

            One of Reynold’s suggestions for getting the most from one’s free writing is to “Re-read your freewriting, “line through all unusable items”, make a list of the “distinctly different ideas” in what remains, and then ask “Can you now add additional ideas to your list? Could you develop a paragraph around any or all ideas?”. This practice he has outlined, along with the other nineteen in their own unique ways, demonstrates precisely the potential of free writing as an effective brainstorm tool. 

4. Romano, Tom. "The Power of Voice." EBSCO Host. Educational Leadership, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.           <http%3A%2F%2Fweb.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.ucsb.edu%3A2048%2Fehost%2Fpdfviewer%2Fpdfviewer%3Fsid%3Dd528e34b-6e79-4f3d-a155-3abd5fe14cde%2540sessionmgr112%26vid%3D10%26hid%3D101>.

            Tom Romano cites Donald Graves’ book Writing: Teachers and Children and Work and names the chance to express one’s voice and “be known”—more than grades, praise, or looming deadlines—as the primary motivations for students to write. He claims that voice “is the key to helping our student develop into writers” and that we “must give them opportunities to hear their own written voices and the written voices of others—their peers, their teachers, and the best authors”. This requires students to feel free to express themselves, which Romano claims can help be facilitated through a classroom environment in which “both error and accomplishment are natural, expected parts of learning”. In such an environment, he claims that teachers can use the practice of free writing or quick writing to “help students to write boldy”.

            Romano describes how middle school language arts teacher Linda Rief utilizes quickwrites in her class in order to “teach her students to launch their voices and outrun the inner censor”, a practice which could be adopted by other educators to similarly help their students develop and demonstrate their own voice in their writing. Rief provides her students with some sort of prompt, often based on literature from the course, has her students quickwrite on the prompt for a few minutes, and then eventually has each student pick one of their quickwrites to develop into a longer piece of work. Once these students “have words on the page, developing those words into longer pieces is not as intimidating as facing a blank sheet of paper”. In this way, Ried promotes that “frequent quickwrites build students’ confidence, develop their written fluency, and bring out every student’s inner writer”. 

5. Reynolds, Mark. "Freewriting's Origins." The English Journal 73.3 (1984): 81-82. JSTOR. Web. 13 Nov. 2014.<http://www.jstor.org/stable/817229?origin=JSTOR-pdf>.

Mark Reynolds names freewriting as one of “the most widely used prewriting exercises”, claims that teachers “like its simplicity, and students appreciate its usefulness in generating new and unexpected ideas”. From this introduction, he begins to give a history of sorts of the practice, saying that the modern use of freewriting “appears to date from the 1960s” and that it “may be one of the few techniques developed during the 1960s student-centered movement which survived its own period and the subsequent back-to-the-basics backlash of the 1970s”. He lists many of the better-known names freewriting has gone under, such as “spontaneous writing, stream-of-consciousness writing… shotgun writing and intensive writing”.

            Reyonlds then begins a discussion around the ideas of Dorothea Brande’s book Becoming a Writer, in which Reynold cites John Gardner as saying that Brande’s purpose is “to lead the writer into close touch with his-her unconscious, help the writer to develop healthy habits… and guide the writer to freedom from all forms of writer’s block.” Reynolds also comments that Brande’s methods focus on harnessing the unconscious, working to “hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm” in order to allow one’s voice to best shine through his-her work. Such an aim, she suggests, can be accomplished through two writing exercises: rising early every morning and beginning to write immediately, and to write at a specified time every day for fifteen minutes on any topic.

            It is to these suggested aims and methods of writing, Reynolds notes, that Ken Macrorie credits his development of freewriting in Uptaught. Reynolds concludes by saying that those “who have experience the virtues of freewriting… and who have seen it work for students in the classroom owe Brande a debt through Macrorie”.