Advantages of Freewriting: Advice to High School Seniors

Starting an essay can be more than difficult, even impossible if you young writers like me do not have the proper basis. When starting an essay typically we first create an outline in order to establish some type of organization for the layout of your essay. Naturally we open with whatever the topic of that essay might be on and write about our feelings on that specific topic, but this can sometimes become very hard if we have writers block and have nothing to say about that specific topic. We are left sitting there in a blank state of mind left unable to produce anything. This is where the advantages of freewriting surface. High school seniors when starting an essay freewriting can help us get our thoughts flowing; reduce repeating ourselves and worrying about grammar and defeat writers block.

Just last year I was a high school senior so I know how hard it could be when writing an essay. If you do not have much to say about the topic you are assigned, one way that the process of freewriting is helpful is that it allows you to get all of your emotions, thoughts and arguments out by helping you get all of your thoughts flowing. Although you are handed an assignment and just spent a whole class talking about the topic it might be hard for you to grasp the topic effectively enough to write a whole essay about it. After reading "Freewriting" by Peter Elbow, I became fascinated by his labeling of freewriting being considered "automatic writing"(2) because you are writing everything that comes to your mind and it is pouring out automatically without any hesitations and just letting the mind flow. Elbow emphasizes that freewriting takes writing above and beyond writing as we know it. It teaches us that we can write anything we want without having to stop and think about it or trying to create a piece of writing that has a distinctive reasoning for being written. Elbow's theory of freewriting as "automatic writing, babbling and jabbering exercises" (2) is so profound because to write what automatically comes off your head is essentially a very easy task. You're writing all of your thoughts onto a piece of paper which is going to eventually help you produce a writing piece. By just letting your mind flow and writing without stopping you are creating new ideas that you didn't think were possible. Normally when you're handed a topic to an essay it could be hard to put your ideas down onto paper so by freewriting on that topic you're letting your imagination run wild, leaving you with a whole new perspective of ideas to write. It enlightens us that meaningless writing is not always meaningless. It can dramatically help one grow in there writing process and enhance their whole idea of writing by letting it all out and just letting the mind flow with tons of new ideas.

Another way that freewriting can be used to your advantage when starting an essay is by allowing you to write as much as possible without worrying about becoming to repetitive or making grammatical mistakes. Talking about one specific topic can be quite hard to do without feeling as if you are sounding repetitive