An Excercise To Help Students Write More Freely

Todd Finley, an associate professor of English education at East Carolina University, shares in this blog post an exercise for helping students write more freely without fear of criticism over punctuation and grammar. In the exercise, students create an autobiographical timeline in five minutes. They then pause to listen to some inspirational poetry before beginning work on a one-sentence, one-page narrative reflecting on an important event in their lives. Students later revise their work, developing it into a sentence-by-sentence format that uses their original narrative.