Research Shows

First, exploratory/journal writing is private writing.  The sole intended audience is the writer. 

Second, it is ungraded.  It is free from worry about a teacher's constraints and correctness. 

Third, it explores topics of the writer's choice for the purpose of discovery. The writer is engaged in thinking deeply and broadly as he or she writes. 

 

Privacy

The first characteristic, privacy is key. For centuries, people have explored their ideas in the privacy of their personal journals. Everything does not need to be explained because the writer is her only audience, and she knows the people and understands the context.  When writers write for themselves, they can focus on the meaning of an event rather than on what others will think. They do not have to be balanced or careful or nice.  They can seek to understand their own reactions and feelings, mixed motives and false intentions, without having to censure their thoughts for fear of being found out.  As a result, many come to understand themselves and their worlds better.

 

Ungraded

The second characteristic of journal writing is that it is ungraded. A teacher does not grade it.  The writer does not need to worry about spelling. Every paragraph does not have to have only one main idea or be logically connected to the previous paragraph.  Journal keepers do not need to worry about meeting a teacher's requirements.

 

Choice of Topic

Third, private writing explores whatever topic the writer chooses to write about.  Topics are not assigned to the writer but rather naturally emerge as the writer begins writing.  Topics often change.  Writers have complete freedom to pursue whatever ideas they desire.  Typically, writing goes beyond mere summary of what is already known and actually generates insight and new thinking. Writers discover something in the process of exploring a topic of their own choosing. 

 

Benefits of Private Writing

Writers have the opportunity to be immersed in what James Moffett calls "chaos"--the complexities and apparent contradictions of their inner thoughts and their topic.  It is a chance to think unconventional thoughts.  Writers have the freedom to think the previously unthinkable, to be politically incorrect, to learn something. It is inherently messy as it explores new avenues and takes side trips, probing ideas from various vantage points. 

 

Mina Shaugnessy writes that the mess is a sign that productive thinking is taking place:

The skill of organizing seems to require a kind of balance between the demand that a piece of writing get someplace along a route that is sufficiently marked for a reader to follow and the demand that there be freedom for the writer to explore his subject and follow where his questions and inventions take him.  This balance produces most of the "mess" in writing.  The formulaic teacher stresses the plan, the direction and procedure over the generative aspects, the invention and discovery times, forcing students to press their thinking into rigid molds that are necessarily inhibiting.  Any technique of organization, however, that ignores the wilderness, that limits the freedom of the writer to see and make choices at every step, to move ahead at times without knowing for certain which is north and south, then to drop back again and pick up the old path, and finally to get where he is going, barely by conscious effort but also by some faculty of intellection that is too complex to understand and technique that sacrifices this fullest possible play of the mind for the security of an outline or some other prefabricated frame cuts the student off from his most productive thinking.  He must be allowed something of a frontier mentality, an over-all commitment, perhaps, to get to California, but a readiness, all along the way, to choose alterative routes and even to sojourn at unexpected places when that seems wise or important, sometimes, even, to decide that California isn't what the writer really had in mind. (qtd. in Wiley 154)

 

Exploratory drafts are a wonderful mess of new thinking that go beyond what poets call "stock response."  Private writing can help student writers move beyond summaries of known conclusions to new thoughts and often gives writers an opportunity to further develop their thinking (Belanoff). 

 

At the very least, exploratory writing gets words down on the page. The words may be a jumbled mess to an outside reader, but to the writer they are the seeds of thought, beginnings that can be revised into an effective final draft.  Pat Belanoff, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl Fontaine point to Ken Macrorie's work as seminal in giving value to exploratory writing (and more specifically freewriting) and much of the credit of uncovering its power is attributed to him (xvii).

 

Freewriting in a Journal

Freewriting is one form of exploratory writing and journal keepers can use freewriting as a technique.  Certainly it is private, ungraded, and on topics of the writer's choice (Elbow, Writing with Power 13, Elbow, Writing Without Teachers 3-4, and Belanoff, Elbow, and Fontaine xi-xviii).  Freewriting is distinctive from other forms of exploratory writing in that it has a fourth characteristic:  a freewriter doesn't stop writing to think.  She continues writing whatever comes to mind, even to the point of writing "nothing" if nothing is coming to mind.  Peter Elbow writes, "To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes. . . .The only point is to keep writing" (Writing with Power 13).

 

While not imposed or required, purpose and structure can generally be seen in freewriting.  Sheryl I. Fontaine, after analyzing almost two hundred samples of her college students' freewriting, concludes that her students freewrite for four basic purposes: to record their experiences, make plans, discover solutions to problems that plague them, or to evaluate their feelings (10).  When freewriting, writers do not throw off all of the conventions of syntax and become the John Berryman of prose.  Exploratory writing does have purpose and structure, but it is a purpose and structure that emerge during the writing rather than purpose and structure that are imposed by the teacher on the writer.

 

Elbow, in Writing Without Teachers, suggests several variations of freewriting.  Any of these variations can be used as a writer begins a writing assignment or throughout the process. Journal keepers can try these approaches as well.

 

Looping

Looping is similar to freewriting, except that after the writer has freewritten for a set period of time, she takes five minutes to read what she's written and underlines the thought that seems most significant.  This golden thought becomes the topic for the next freewrite.  This process is repeated three or four times in one sitting, or over the course of several days.

                                         

I've included a Literature Review on Freewriting which shows that secular research supports the value of private writing.

 

LITERATURE REVIEW on Freewriting

 

Review of Freewriting

In my search for studies that analyzed the connection between freewriting and revision, I found that freewriting has been studied from three main perspectives since Macrorie's Telling Writing and Elbow's Writing without Teachers were published.  Teachers and researchers have written about the value of freewriting in helping students as writers, readers, and critical thinkers. 

 

Writers

First, freewriting has been studied from the perspective of how it can benefit the writer.  Roy Moxley's research shows that in early elementary school as the number of words written in freewrites increases so does expressiveness in writing.  Linda Polin writes that freewriting also helps student writers find their own voice.  In her classroom, freewriting is a place for students to try on different voices and take a variety of perspectives without the fear of grades and failure.  Since freewriting is ungraded, it is the perfect place to risk.  When students are polled, freewriting is the preferred pre-writing strategy for all levels of writers (Pope and Prater).  In addition, freewriting can be used to help students resolve personal struggles (Spires).  Sheryl Fontaine discovers her students writers used their freewriting for the purpose of understand how experiences, feelings, and values influence their way of looking at the world.  She concludes that freewriting aids students in understanding why they think and act the way they do (Fontaine 13).  Shaugnessy believes that a writer needs time for exploration to develop her thinking and determine the best structure.  Without this opportunity, the final product may be a well-ordered but empty paper.   Shaugnessy and Elbow write that exploratory writing benefits the writer by getting words down on the page early in the process.  The words do not need to follow a writer's carefully determined plan.  There is time for side-trips and stopping to ask directions and back-tracking, which gives hope of an interesting paper (Shaugnessy qtd. in Wiley 149-56).

 

Elbow also writes that freewriting benefits the writer by providing time to discover ideas that do not have to first be evaluated.  He believes it is important to have a time to write when the internal editor is turned off:  "Thus the potentiality in writing that I want to highlight here does not just involve generative techniques for getting first drafts written quicker, but rather a genuine change in mentality or consciousness" (72).  One value of exploratory writing in Elbow's thinking is that it is "not so much to express what we think, but rather to develop and transform it" (Elbow, "The Shifting Relationships between Speech and Writing" 73).  Even though much of the freewriting never appears in the finished work, it often produces some very good bits of effective writing (Elbow qtd. in Belanoff).

 

Thomas Hilgers' empirical research substantiates Elbow's thinking.  In 1980, he finds that freewriting benefits writers in completing effective final papers.  He focuses on the impact of using freewriting as a heuristic.  He compares the effects of providing college freshmen instruction on freewriting to the effects of providing them instruction in a "communications awareness/problem solving approach."  In his study, students freewrite, stop and re-read their freewriting, looking for meaning, then they sum up the main point.  This application of freewriting is shown to be an effective heuristic that significantly improves finished writing.  "It seems logical to see this study in general as supporting the contention that training in freewriting results in an improved written product" (304).  Hilgers suggests that future research should break freewriting into component parts in order to better determine what aspects are responsible for the improvement.  His research finds an improved written product in both in-class and out-of-class writing assignments. 

 

The 1984 Wisconsin Pupil Assessment Program Report confirms Hilgers's findings.  They, too, discover that freewriting benefits writers by helping them complete more effective final drafts.  They found that 73.8% of their students showed no evidence of pre-writing, but for the 26.2% of their students who did pre-write:  "At each grade, students who showed evidence of pre-writing, received higher holistic and primary trait scores" (9).  Pre-writing activities were beneficial in producing good final drafts.  This report validates the use of pre-writing activities in the classroom because of the benefits for student writers at all grade levels.

 

Readers

Not only has freewriting been studied from the perspective of its benefit for the writer, but also from the perspective of how it benefits the reader.  Students are found to engage more in their reading texts if they freewrite about their reading (Bodmer, and House).  "A Reading-Writing Connection in the Content Areas--Secondary Perspectives" published in the Journal of Reading found that students benefit from making a connection between their reading and writing if they freewrite.  Bruce Ballenger writes that his students will make connections between their learning in content classrooms and gain authority over what they read when they freewrite regularly.  Students better comprehend what they read if they freewrite (Williams).  Freewriting aids students' comprehension of literature and their enjoyment of it at the college level (Bodmer).

 

Thinkers

Third, freewriting has been shown to be practice in critical thinking.  John Dewy alerts teachers to the error of talking about teaching students to critically think (Blau).  He believes that thinking is not something that is taught.  Rather, thinking is what the student naturally does.  So, in his view, freewriting does not teach a student to think but gives her an opportunity to focus on an idea and think deeply about it.  Deborah G. Wooldridge and Mary Jeanne Weber show that structured assignments followed by freewriting aid in the development of critical thinking.  Fontaine writes that the recursiveness of looking at events first in a generalized way, then pushing them into abstractions that go beyond the immediate situation to other situations, then forming further generalizations is wonderful critical thinking practice for her students (13-14).         

 

Belanoff writes in "Freewriting: An Aid to Rereading Theorists" of connections she discovered between how exploratory writing generates new thoughts and how Ann Berthoff, Lev Vygotsky, James Moffett, and James Britton conceptualize how meaning is created and critical thinking is developed (16-31).  Belanoff believes that composition teachers can better understand the value of exploratory writing (and specifically freewriting) as we better understand the critical thinking that takes place as our students' write to make meaning of their private thoughts.  These theorists discuss the private thoughts that occur within our minds all of the time.  According to their works, we make our worlds make sense as we define these inner voices, structure the chaos, and put these thoughts into words.  This world of private thinking is the pool that is dipped into during exploratory writing. 

 

Belanoff discusses Ann Berthoff's concept of making order and meaning of inner chaos and makes the connection to the way freewriting puts the inner chaos into words and onto paper so that we can make meaning of it.  Belanoff also re-reads Lev Vygotsky.  He posits a progression from maximally implicit to maximally explicit understanding.  Belanoff believes freewriting fosters this movement from implicit to explicit knowledge.  The third theorist, James Moffett, writes that learning takes place when "content and form are not given to the learner but when she must find and forge her own from her inchoate thought" (Belanoff, Elbow, and Fontaine 22).  Freewriters are about the task of finding and forging their own thoughts and then shaping them into a form that provides readers enough structure.  Finally, Belanoff writes of James Britton, who underscores the importance of "shaping at the point of utterance" (Belanoff, Elbow, and Fontaine 26).  She writes that the shaping Britton speaks of is exactly what the writer does during freewriting. 

 

As Belanoff re-reads Berthoff, Vygotsky, Moffett, and Britton, she comes to understand some relationships between freewriting and thinking.  In addition to understanding how freewriting is connected to shaping a writer's thoughts, Elbow and Berthoff also believe that freewriting helps thinking because it creates a need for dialogue, which then evolves into an effective form (Belanoff, Elbow, and Fontaine, 26).  These four theorists show how critical thinking often begins with a new idea that forms out of our inner voices and thoughts.  Freewriting, as Belanoff points out, puts into words and gives shape to these inner thoughts.

 

Freewriting benefits student writers by giving them practice in critical thinking and reflective inquiry.  Putting words on our inner voices, discovering a new idea, ruminating on an idea for a while, finding insight as it is abstracted to other situations, formulating new thoughts, creating principles and new connections are reflective thinking.  They are at the heart of exploratory writing.

 

Criticism of Freewriting

But not all studies on freewriting demonstrate its strengths.  Mark Reynolds looks at how to make freewriting more effective, while other researchers specifically analyze the limitations of freewriting (Fox, and Cheshire).  In one study, freewriting is not shown to increase students' writing fluency or decrease writing apprehension (Cheshire).  However, in the Cheshire study, it is interesting to note that for most students, increased anxiety appears to result in better writing, although there does come a point at which writing anxiety does interfere with the student's ability to write well.  Although some studies analyze the limitations of freewriting, no studies point to any writing detriments.  Robert Boice and Patricia E. Meyers voice a potential psychological concern that freewriting may lead a writer too deep into their inner thoughts and create psychological turmoil that neither the writer nor the teacher are prepared to resolve.  This psychological concern aside, no studies document that freewriting hinders a student's ability to write well.  The testimonies of teachers and the research in my literature review were overwhelmingly positive.  At worst, as Hacker writes, "Even if nothing happens you have lost only ten minutes" (7).  It is much more likely, however, that students will benefit in their writing, reading, and thinking as they spend time freewriting.

 

Conclusions

In conclusion, freewriting certainly has a history and has become recognized to the point of being included in reference manuals and texts on the teaching of writing (Boice and Meyers).  Freewriting has been shown to benefit many writers in helping them to find their voice, take risks, generate and develop new thinking, discern a logical structure, and thus write more effective papers.  Freewriting benefits many readers by aiding in comprehension and in making connections between what is read and the world.  Finally, freewriting gives students practice in various aspects of critical and reflective thinking.