I going to take you through a writing exercise called free writing there are a lot of different ways to free write i like to walk students through this process because it well it does some amazing things and I'm going to explain that in just a bit okay so what is free writing.Free writing is sitting down in writing without stopping with the goal of the kind of generating ideas you're not necessarily trying to write a paper you're just trying to get ideas flowing, so I like to lump this process this idea along with brainstorming now I don't do this every single time but it is something I like my students to go through because it teaches them something a little bit about themselves.
what they're capable of when you kind of put a time limit on something so we're going to do this in a couple of different routes around one - what I want you to do is sit down with your idea and set a time five minutes ten minutes and just write without stopping and without deleting or editing or correcting your work in any way you are just free writing you're trying to get the ideas down without that sort of speed bump or speed limit if you will the thing that's going to stop you which is the editor in your head the voice that tells you nah don't do that no that's stupid that's dumb you'll never use that tune that voice off you are just going to write uninterrupted for like five ten minutes set a timer make sure it's somewhere where you could see put it on your phone and set it there so that you can keep going and just write and right.
Now that you've gone through, you've taken five, ten minutes and you've just written without stopping look at how many words you wrote if you wrote by hand it's a little harder to tell you can just kind of look at like how much paper you filled up you know half page, but if you're on a computer do a word check a word count select your words and see how much how many words you wrote this is for you isn't like a competition against anyone except yourself this is just tracking.
How much you're able to get done in a short artificial period okay so with that number in mind, look at what you wrote read through it and find the best detail the best idea the thing that you think has the most merit for what you're finally going to write your paper about, circle it highlight it make it on your paper your computer screen whatever and then that's what I want you to focus on for the next five to ten minutes okay so here's you're gonna do just like you did the first time you're gonna set a timer on your phone on your whatever you're gonna set it.
Where you can see it and then you're gonna write focusing specifically on that that that thing that you think is the most value the most merit and you're just gonna dig deeper into that okay and again same thing you're writing without stopping you're not editing you're not deleting something that you think isn't working you're just writing.
in mind do you think if hadn't set up this activity in this way you would have been able to write that much in 20 min just knowing yourself is this consistent with what you would write or did you write more, I like for students to do this because more often than not they write a whole lot more than they expect now for this essay I might require students to write 500 or 750 words, not something that's extremely long in terms of an essay you may think well that is long but a lot of students when they do this activity they're able to write several hundred words maybe 300 or more words in a span of like 20 minutes and if you're writing a 500 word essay total.
It teaches you what you are capable of doing in such a short period and I think that's important for students to understand that when you create an environment where you can just focus on trying to get some writing done then you are less concerned about what am I going to write about. You have something to work with instead of sharing at a blank screen with the cursor just blinking at you and you don't know what to do all right i hope this was helpful in my experience I've been doing this for years it's almost always a very positive experience for students.
so see you all soon I will upload my next blog very soon, Thank you for giving my blog your precious time.
This is my participation post for Initiative:APRILINLEO