Free-writing:
What am I doing? I'm posting on my blog on a thursday night and I have nine hours of classes tomorrow. I wish it were physically possible to build a time machine that can go backwards in time so that I can convince my former self to NOT stack my classes on a friday. What was I thinking? Yeah the rest of my week looks nice, but my fridays are absoultely terrible! I'm craving an energy drink, but I don't want to get up and walk downstairs all the way to late night, and late night is closing anyways. I'm two blinks away from falling asleep! Grrr, this is bad... My mind is blanking out, but I must continue thinking of whatever thoughts come into my head for this free-writing. I have 100 pages of reading to do and a ridiculous amount of studying as well. I crave sleep. There are people talking really loudly on the floor below me and I can hear them! Why is my mind blanking out when it normally bounces from one thought to another? Bleh... I should really get to sleep, but I can't because my grade depends me typing this out. Well I'm glad I remembered to do this before it was too late. Oh wait, it's past midnight. Oh well, partial credit is better than no credit. At least I remembered to do it...
Directed Writing:
Believe it or not, I have revised this portion of this post 36 times! I didn't revise any part of the free-writing except to correct a few typos and spelling errors, but I believe I pressed the "Backspace" key literally over a thousand times for this directed writing example. Anyways, this type of writing obviously differs greatly from free-writing because it has direction. Rather than just writing (typing) whatever pops into my head like with the free-writing example, I am instead directing this writing example on the subject of direct writing versus free-writing. Though the two are obviously very different, all directed writing comes from (mental) free-writing. All of the words that appear in this part of the post were first thought of in my head as thoughts that, though directed to reflect this, did not necessarily have anything to do with this subject. In that sense, they were first free-writing ideas that weren't put on page, but were filtered so that only the ideas related to this subject actually appear on the screen in front of you. Though this type of writing has more applications, free-writing is very important for engineers to do because it forces us to jot every idea that comes to our minds and can thus be a valuable asset for brainstorming solutions to a specific problem in engineering.
Your free-writing example was pretty fun. It's just interesting to see someone's stream of consciousness. Ever read any James Joyce? He's famous for that kind of writing. It's really neat to see where your thoughts end up once you let them run. Who knows, they might even lead you somewhere useful!
ReplyDeleteYour remark that all directed writing comes from free writing is very interesting! In my work as a writing tutor, we were always told that one of the best ways to get a student brainstorming was to have them freewrite. Do you think this helps motivate the "mental" freewriting that you talked about?
On the other hand, to what degree is directed writing actually not just revised freewriting? My opinion is that in directed writing, you brainstorm an outline, or main topics that you want to cover, before launching into your directed freewrite to pile on the details.
Your free writing is quite interesting. I have just one thing in mind that if you are writing on thursday night and the blog is due friday midnight you will get full credit instead of partial credit. Perhaps while you were writing this you were half asleep.
ReplyDeleteWow 36 times! I hope you got some rest that night. I agree with what you said about directed writing coming from a form of mental free writing but I think that if you had done a very quick written outline then perhaps you wouldn't have needed 36 revisions. It might have helped to focus your thoughts a little better instead of doing it all in your head and possibly forgetting previous thoughts in your extremely tired state.
ReplyDelete-Tom
I like the idea that free writing helps to "forces us to jot every idea that comes to our minds" I bought a little notebook in the beginning of the semester and write all important thoughts in it as they come out. It's like a mini diary. I understood that it helps to arrange my time better and I remember better the information that I write out.
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