Class February 22

Today you looked over the comments to your literacy narratives and did some freewriting to your focus. We talked over Elbow's theories about why/how freewriting works. It can be used to break the habit of excessive, premature editing, as well as to make a connection to half-conscious, partially realized ideas. The exercise we did in class was "focused freewriting" which allows you to associate to (or not) a particular set of ideas, and in that way - deepen + explore what you might write; I described how focused freewriting could be connected to "looping" - a process where you select a set of new, interesting, or related ideas from your freewrite and then do additional freewriting to deepen your exploration of those topics.

Revised (final) literacy narratives are due, Monday, March 1.

In addition to discussing Elbow and working on your revisions to you literacy narratives, we talked through the assignment sheet for the essay on your writing process (posted on the previous blog).

For Wednesday:

Read: Elbow, Ch. 2, "Growing"
Blog 10: Post some detailed notes on your writing process. You can describe the step-by-step process you used to work on the literacy narrative (including the class assignments). You might look at differences between the pre-writing, first draft, and final draft you posted on your blog as evidence of what you did.

If you want to document your step by step process for writing - you might compose your next essay using google.docs (I can show you how to do this in class if you are not familiar with it). These documents not only show the 'final product', they also track the sequence of changes you make as you write. Work on your document for a while. You need to save your document as you work (after you make significant revisions). After you reach a point where you want to look at your patterns for writing, save your document, then click "file" => and choose "see revision history" from the dropdown list. This will give you a list of links to the sequential documents at the "save" points you created as you were writing. It can be pretty interesting.