Free Writing

The creative writing class is currently in the middle of a two-week unit of writing in response to prompts in the style of "free writing."

Free writing is a pre-writing technique where the person writes continuously for a set amount of time without regard to spelling or grammar, and without stopping to fix mistakes.

The goal is to generate as many potential pieces of writing as possible, At the end of our two weeks, students will select one piece that is most worthy of revision, and work on finishing it for a few days in class. They will only be required to turn in one piece of writing from the unit by posting it in their online portfolio, our class wiki page.

As we write each day, students are encouraged, but not required, to share their day's writing with the class, either by reading it or summarizing it. It is not a full conference, as we do with other revised pieces of writing, but a chance to share where they took the prompts and benefit from each other's ideas.

So far we are off to a good start. I found some good writing prompts at daily-writing-prompt.com, and modified several of them for our own use.

What writing prompts have you used? What experiences have you had with free writing that worked well? Please share in the comments below!

See you next Tuesday.