Students (and writers of all ages and experience) often have a hard time getting started. They sit and stare at the blank page or screen, and the words won’t come. What to do?
A strategy that has been around at least since the mid-1970s, but often is underused, is called free writing. It also is called “stream-of-consciousness writing” because it involves simply writing whatever comes to mind without regard to sense, sentence structure, spelling, grammar, and so forth. The idea is to free the writer’s thinking by pushing aside the conscious blockage of the mind, which can be caused by anxiety, apathy, uncertainty, or other emotional or intellectual impediments. Blunting the influence of these impediments by free writing allows the subconscious to spur creativity. Eventually a cogent idea will emerge that can be shaped and set into prose, poetry, dialogue, or some other desired form.
To use free writing, ask students to write continuously for one to five minutes. Ask them to turn off conscious thinking and write whatever pops into their heads, even nonsense. The idea is to keep writing for the set time. After the free-writing period, ask students to turn their attention to responding to the question or prompt that embodies the actual assignment or project.
Spontaneous writing can be difficult. Yet it often is required, for example, in testing situations. Students need to be able to read a question or writing prompt and set immediately to work producing a coherent, organized, well-developed response in order to do well on an essay test. A way to build skill in spontaneous writing is to practice. One element of practice, certainly at the beginning, may be free writing. It’s a handy starter. Once students develop a capacity for fluent spontaneity, free writing can be dispensed with; however, it is always a useful fallback technique whenever students get stuck at the beginning of a writing assignment.
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