Self Taught Writers

by 3rd in a 29 part series

The most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do free writing exercises regularly. At least three times a week. They're sometimes called "automatic writing," "babbling," or "jabbering" exercises.

What I like about this quote from Peter Elbow is the truth that is in it. In relation to the title of the book this may seem a little bit crazy. It seems that this would be, at best, a deliberate action to stifle a person's writing ability. However, these free writing exercises are more helpful than they are hurtful. I do it especially whenever I feel a little writer's block. For me the idea is to just let go and write regardless of sentence structure, syntax, mechanics or anything else that we might pay attention to as writers while we write. Free writing does exactly what its name says. By allowing all the anxiety in the mind to filter down through the arms and out the hands to a piece of paper we release the pressure we sometimes experience as writers.

This subject was not taught in the elementary or high school classrooms of my past. My experience with writing as a student in high school came down to writing some phrase of thousand times for being disobedient or to write book reports. Even in English classes writing leaned to a literary penchant and was not for those who had a different focus on life as a teenager. This is not to say that Shakespeare wasn't interesting or that the Canterbury Tales didn't bring me a little life; writing as an art was just not taught that way. What little writing we did do generally pertained to homework assignments where we were to read some chapters from the Literature book and write a report about it or we would have some essay-type questions to answer.

The reason I focused on this particular passage and Peter Elbow's book is because of the experience I had as a freshman in college. It wasn't too long after my first composition class started that I realized there were a lot more students who didn't have a clue on how to put together a coherent paragraph. Because of this I have become a strong advocate for writing centers in high schools around Arkansas. I believe that if high schools focused more on the writing process and were able to put together some writing centers where high school students could go and learn the processes of writing in a controlled atmosphere then the college experience would be much better than it is today.

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Self Taught Writers