Freewriting

As I was reading Freewriting by Peter Elbow, I instantly thought of middle school and one of my best friends. We had most of our classes together and our lockers were across from each other, so the classes that we didn’t have together, left availability to sneak a letter into each others’ locker.

The reason this comes to mind is free writing in itself. Elbow claims that free writing is “most effective way I know to improve your writing”, is so true. My example of passing notes for one is an occasion where free writing can help to improve writing in general, but only if someone keeps the notes for later. In my case, I have almost every note that I passed in middle school. Only one of my friends is aware of this, she in fact has a good portion of the notes that I am missing. Whenever we get together, we pull out all of these notes we passed and we read through them. We laugh about what was going on in our lives that was so important that we just couldn’t pay attention in class. We laugh about how we how many mistakes we made as we were writing because we were in such a hurry and didn’t read over it to make sure it made sense, yet at the time when we passed it on and read it, it made perfect sense. But whenever we look at these old notes, we realize that because we wrote them for each others’ eyes only and not for a grade, they were fun and it didn’t matter what we wrote. (Well of course it mattered to us, but it wasn’t as important as making sure we would get a good grade on it. We didn’t grade each other on the content and grammar of our notes. Had we though, we may not still have these ridiculously funny notes).

It’s kind of like drawing a picture when you’re bored, a lot of people write when they’re bored. To their friends, relatives even just little poems and rhymes. No one ever sees them half of the time, but because we are writing for the heck of it, we are improving our writing. I don’t necessarily believe that we learn from just writing without going back and reading the last sentence when we are at a loss for words. I think that we do learn from going back and reading that last sentence or two to help us continue writing. So I can’t say that I can completely agree with Elbow in this aspect of writing about nonsense and just writing for the practice of it. What I can agree on is that writing for fun and just writing to write, whether or not anyone sees it, does improve our writing.