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Discover how informal writing assignments can help students overcome thinking blocks in a specific course or assignment. Learn from the experience of incorporating informal writing to overcome thinking blocks and gain insights from a study on the benefits of informal and formal writing assignments.
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Informal writing @ DSU Mike Peterson, Ph.D. English Department
Free-writing • Free-writing is essentially thinking on paper • You can write anything you want • These won’t be read by anyone else (you might be asked to share some of your ideas) • Try to keep your pen moving; if you stall on an idea, move on! • Silence your inner critic • Feel free to write in bullet-points and sentence fragments
“You can’t think your way out of a writing block, but you can write your way out of a thinking block.” –Merlin Mann
“You can’t think your way out of a writing block, but you can write your way out of a thinking block.” Free-Writing Prompt (3-ish minutes): Think of a specific course, assignment, or principle that often causes your students to have thinking blocks. How could an informal-writing assignment help your students get past that block? Alternative Prompt: How has writing about something helped you get past a thinking block?
Informal Formal
83% of Writing Assignments* Informal Formal *2006 study of 2,100 courses in varied disciplines across the country
DSU Faculty 68 Responses February 2017
Informal-writing assignment: • short (a couple pages or less) • low-stakes (worth few points) • unedited
Panopticon Grading • Skim/Read Quickly • Don’t worry about sloppiness or errors • Add comments or questions to only a few
Follow Up “Listing” In your journal or on piece of paper, write two specific things you learned from today’s discussion AND two specific ways you plan to incorporate informal-writing assignments in your teaching
