On several Fridays this semester I asked my students to spend 10 minutes freewriting at the beginning of the class. Sometimes I gave them topics that were loosely related to the main ideas of their essay prompts. Other times I asked them to “vent” and tell me what they were thinking and feeling. I wanted to know what they were angry or worried or happy about. The ground rules were that their pens and pencils must move the entire time and that they couldn’t edit themselves no matter how atrocious their spelling or grammar was.
My intentions were two-fold. I wanted to show hesitant writers that words DO come, and I wanted them to understand that words are not a precious commodity to be meted out in fully-formed, perfect sentences. Words are plentiful, and shouldn’t be rationed.
After 10 minutes I asked them to finish their immediate thoughts and then we talked a little bit about what they’d discovered as they wrote. Sometimes they had tiny epiphanies. Sometimes they started out, “This is stupid and I am tired, but my teacher said I had to do this, so I am doing it.” Generally, though, asking them to freewrite enabled them to find what Peter Elbow calls the “center of gravity” in their writing and they were able to begin to scaffold their final papers around their unedited thoughts.
Allowing students the chance to be expressive in their writing and then giving them a platform to speak their ideas is of immeasurable importance as teachers build class rapport and “safe” learning environments.