Monday, September 12, 2011
Get more productivity out of your Free-Writes
Everyone knows how boring writing can be....right?? Well instead of just trying to come up with something to write about, why not write about a class subject. Maybe write about a topic, in that subject, that you don't know very much on and see what you come up with. And if you can't find anything to write on or don't know very much about it, then do some research or readings on that topic so you know what you're talking about. Who knows, maybe the topic might become more interesting then before or maybe you'll understand it a lot more than before. It worked for me because I used it on an Exam I recently took and finished in 15-20 minutes, which was suppose to take 50 minutes. Open-Ended writing helped me study and better prepare me for it. Try it and see what happens, you might be surprised. Comment on this and tell me if it has worked or not. Thanks.
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As I said in class when you brought this up: excellent advice. In fact, Elbow in his book Writing with Power recommends just such a thing: write constantly about whatever you're reading and/or studying. He even suggests that you don't take notes in classes, but that instead you just listen as well as you can and then free-write for 10-15 minutes afterwards about what you heard via summary, observation, questioning, and so forth. The idea is that the topic isn't abstract as it is in your notes; rather, by writing about it, you internalize it to some degree, making what you're learning really what you're learning.
ReplyDeleteThis advice helped me a lot. Even though I hate researching and studying, I found out that if you want to learn more, you have to push yourself to learn.
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