Discuss
Have you tried freewriting before? To see what freewriting feels like, write on this general prompt: important issues on our campus. Write for at least 10 minutes, nonstop, about that statement. Don’t think about organization, grammar, punctuation, or spelling, and don’t stop writing until the time is up. Discuss with your classmates your reactions to writing this way and what each of you wrote.
Also known as prewriting or rehearsing, freewriting is a way to explore a topic. This preliminary step in the writing process involves preparing to write by filling your mind and the page or the screen with information from the sources that you found through your research. Writing expert Peter Elbow asserts that it’s impossible to write effectively if you simultaneously try to organize, check grammar and spelling, and offer intelligent thoughts to your readers.2
Elbow argues that we can free up our writing and bring more energy and voice into it by writing more like the way we speak and trying to avoid the heavy overlay of editing in our initial efforts to write. By freewriting, Elbow simply means writing without worrying about punctuation, grammar, spelling, and context. In this step you are writing without trying to organize, find exactly the right words, or think about structure. Freewriting is also a way to break the habit of trying to write and edit at the same time.
When you freewrite, you might notice that you have more ideas than can fit into one paper, which is very common. Fortunately, freewriting helps you choose, narrow, and research a topic. It helps you figure out what you really want to say as you make connections between different ideas. When you freewrite, you’ll see important issues emerge that you can use as keywords in developing your theme and thesis. Remember that keywords are synonyms, related terms, or subtopics that we use to find materials for our research papers.