Writing Studio

Free-Writing: The Strongest Tool in your Toolbox

March 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

— Robert Cormier, American author, columnist and reporter

When it comes to college writing, one of the biggest mistakes a writer can make is treating a paper as a single monolithic task. The most successful writers (however you define that term– to me, successful writers are those for whom the business of writing isn’t crippling ) are the ones who break writing up into smaller pieces. Starting at the first sentence of the introduction and writing to the last sentence of the conclusion very, very rarely works. That’s why we teach writing as an iterative process, something that moves in spurts and starts, not something that is linear.

Since many of us get sidetracked by the need to get our wording “just right” as we draft, that can be a very anxiety inducing part of the process. One of the most powerful tools to help, in a situation like that, is free-writing. Free-writing means writing continuously, without stop, without any attention to grammar or sentence structure or style. Often, free-writing gives us some of the best raw material for building out more polished writing.

So next time you feel stuck, or getting sucked into the minutia of your sentences, or are simply getting bored of writing, try one of these exercises:

Free-Write like the CIA

  • set a timer for 2 minutes and start writing
  • the only rule is: don’t stop writing! If you need write “I don’t know what to write” 16 times in a row, go for it!
  • leave blanks spaces (or place holders, like ‘verb here’ or ‘quotation’ or ‘come back to this’) when you start to hesitate.
  • if you’re a multilingual writer, try writing in a language other than English or a mix of both.
  • the free-writing may look like some sort of redacted CIA document as you writes, but the point is to ignore individual word choice and focus instead on general gist
  • you can also try “invisible writing”, dimming the computer screen while writing so that you doen’t get sucked into the temptation of fixing individual word choice

Looped Free-Writing (aka ‘mining’)

  • set a timer for 2 minutes and start writing, following the prompt above
  • after 2 minutes look over what you’ve written, pick one sentence (or phrase, or idea) that you find interesting
  • write for another 2 minutes expanding on that idea (still focusing on writing continuously, not writing nicely)
  • repeat as long as this is productive

You can use free-writing at the very beginning of your writing process, as you’re collecting your ideas, after you’ve sorted out your structure or outline and are getting started with drafting, when you get stuck in an unproductive writing rut…pretty much any time you like! Give it a go this week and see what happens…

Writing is Reading

February 24, 2025 / / 0 Comments
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” -Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

The best way to improve your writing is to read more. That might sound like a hot take, but hear us out! Reading and writing may seem like polar opposites, like input vs output, but they’re actually pretty similar cognitive processes. Both involve the ability to remember and recognize different words and sentences styles, can develop attention span and  processing speed, and might even be related to cognitive health.

On a more practical level, reading lots of different genres (thinking fantasy vs autobiography, but also think short-form journalism vs social media posts) exposes us to different styles of self-expression. Moreover, the ways that we read are often part of our process for building arguments in college writing. Think about how many times you have been asked to analyze a source or “close read” a text. So for today’s post, we’re going to spend a little time thinking about this particular skill that college writers are so often asked to exercise.

What is close reading? 

Different fields can have slightly different definitions of (or uses for) the term, but in a nutshell this is a form of analysis that uses careful and deep examination of the details of a text. A reader might ask questions about the form of a text, it’s production context, literary or rhetorical devices at play, and specific word choices. These questions form the basis of all sorts of intellectual inquiry, and will provide the evidence that scholar uses to make an argument about a text.

How do I do a close reading?

  1.  Treat the text as an object and ask questions about:
  • argument: what is it arguing, for what audience? How does it communicate its main ideas?
  • structure and form: what comes first? What comes next? How is it presented? What tone, imagery, and language does it use?
  • production: in what social context was it created and for what consumer?
  • author: what do we know about the author? How does that context show up in the text?
  1. Treat the text as a work of art and ask questions about:
  • clarity: is it easy to understand, and if not, why?
  • patterns: are words or images repeated? Why?
  • mood: how does the text evoke a certain mood?
  • syntax: how does the arrangement of words affect meaning?
  1. Annotate** the text by highlighting interesting words or phrases, looking up words you don’t know, paying attention to conflicts, patterns, and emotions, and writing questions in the margins.

**Annotation will be the subject of our next blog post!

Exercise ideas:

  1. Pick 1 paragraph from a class reading and choose one topic from the list above to focus on. Spend 5 minutes re-reading and annotating the paragraph, then spend 5 minutes free-writing at least 4 sentences about that paragraph using those observations. Repeat with different focuses.
  2. Take a writing prompt from a class and do a close reading of it, treating the professor who wrote it as an unknown author and the prompt as a literary text.
  3. Listen to a brief song and think about how it makes you feel (or tries to make you feel). Think about the patterns and phrases of the song to identify how it achieves that.

How do I Use a Close Reading to Build an Argument?

1. Perform a close reading of your text to collect data. You may want to:

  • identify the main claim of the text
  • observe how the author makes their point persuasive
  • observe your reactions to the text; consider how the text created those reactions
  • examine what you know about the cultural context of your text and author (but you might also want to leave this out– sometimes it can be distracting to think about the author and the text)

2. Interpret/explain that data, answering the question “so what?”

  • In this step, you are making general claims that are grounded in textual evidence—in other words, you are arguing that the text creates meaning in a certain way.

3. Synthesize (draw connections or differences) between all the pieces of data that you have observed.

4. Observe your reactions to the text; consider how the text created those reactions.

5. Examine what you know about the cultural context of your text and author (but you might also want to leave this out– sometimes it can be distracting to think about the author and the text)

 

 

Writing is a Conversation

February 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Ask three different people what writing is and you’ll get three different answers. One person might tell you that it is the physical act of assigning visual forms to words and thoughts, of representing on paper (even digitally) our ideas. Another might say that writing is simply a form of communication, while the third might argue that writing is a way of making meaning.

It can be easy to default to thinking about writing mainly as the first two of these definitions, a tool for transferring ideas to paper, but it is in that meaning-making definition that the real meat of writing resides. Another way to think about this is to think of the social nature of writing: writing always has an audience, an reader that the author is somehow interacting with or trying to persuade. The stakes of that persuasion may be different–a text message to your friends inviting them to dinner at the caf feels very different than a grocery list written for yourself or an academic paper written for a class– but the interaction between author and audience is never absent.

Because of that, it can be helpful to think about writing as a conversation. You pitch yourself different depending on who you’re speaking to, right? Asking your best friend if you can borrow something of theirs should sound very different than asking a professor for a letter of recommendation! You would use different forms of address, you might build up to your ask in different ways, you’d probably pick different environments or times of day at which to ask, and even the intonations of your voice might even be different. While we can’t completely recreate those verbal cues of intonation in writing, we can influence how the reader “hears” us through our use of specific vocabulary, syntax (i.e. choices of grammar or sentence structure), and even formatting. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘tone‘ in writing.

For instance, in the paragraph above, I signaled a more personal tone by using the pronoun “you” and addressing you, my reader, directly. I signaled a slightly more informal tone by using some varying punctuation, both in the form of the rhetorical question and in the exclamation point. I used a contraction (“can’t” instead “cannot”) for the same reason. You can imagine how differently this post would read if I were prioritizing an impersonal and extremely formal tone (boring– that’s how it would read!) Those are all rhetorical decisions I made, decisions that I hope will effect how persuasive my argument is to you, and they are all decisions that I made with my audience in mind.

As you write this week, consider these questions:

  1. Who are you writing for? Your professor? Your peers? A fictional audience? 
  2. What information does that person need, and what do they already have? 
  3. What changes can you make to your tone to be as persuasive as possible?
  4. Would you be writing differently if you were only writing for yourself?

Happy writing!

 

 

The forecast calls for…Brainstorms!

February 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

 

Ever wondered where the term “brainstorm” comes from?” Well, for the Victorians it had a pseudo-scientific meaning, a literal derangement that might come along with an epileptic seizure; it was used figuratively, as well, to mean “a temporary loss of reason, a serious error of judgement” (all this according to the O.E.D., the best source available for going down etymological rabbit holes!) By the mid-1940s it was being used as a verb in a much more familiar way, “to analyse in a group discussion of spontaneously arising ideas”. I want to draw your attention to a few things in that O.E.D definition…

“…spontaneously arising ideas…”

In last week’s post I mentioned how easy it is to think of writing as the final product and not all the messy stuff that goes into creating that product. Brainstorming, a part of the pre-writing process (although of course it can happen at any stage when you’re writing!), is delightfully messy because it is all about letting your mind wander.

Here’s an example of one of my brainstorms, a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles. The three circles are labeled “Arachne”, “spider”, and “Proserpina”, and are meaningful to me. They might not make much sense to you though, because I wasn’t worrying, as I wrote this, about communicating my thoughts to someone else. Instead, I was focusing on getting my own ideas clear. If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s at least one question mark in there, and at least one made up word,  ways that I represent thoughts to myself. Sometimes my brainstorms looks like a post-it note with a list of questions; or a piece of paper that looks a lot like a spider web, with words connected by lines; or a few handwritten sentences on a printed out draft when I’m trying to figure out where to go next. I like to start on paper, but voice memos and the Notes App on your phone are also a great tools for brainstorming. The goal is not to articulate your ideas correctly or clearly, it’s to recognize what your ideas actually are!

 

Here’s another example of what a brainstorm might look like. This is an early outline of the first draft of the fourth chapter of my dissertation, and you can see a bunch of topics I wanted to write about labeled 1-4. There are a few quotes from authors that I noted down, there are thoughts to myself (“p. 92 she doesn’t get grief” is obviously a personal thought and shoes that I was thinking about how to push against the scholar I was reading), there are squiggly arrows connecting ideas, there are exclamation points, question marks, and moments where I decided had to use red ink for some reason. I wrote this after reading a bunch of scholarship and after writing a chunk of my first draft. I had gotten stuck, and didn’t know what to write next– getting away from the computer (and from full sentences) helps me discover coherent thoughts and get over a bout of writer’s block.

 

“…analyse in a group…”

If you click through the second O.E.D link above, you’ll realize that every use of “brainstorm” as a verb provided by the dictionary involves collaboration. Contrary to the popular myths about writing being a solitary experience, one of the core beliefs of any Writing Center is that writing happens in community. Writing is a form of conversation, of communication, so it kind of can’t be solitary, can it? You’re always writing to someone (even if that someone is yourself when you write a grocery list or in a journal). The topic for next week will be collaboration in the writing process, but in the meantime, consider experimenting a little with your brainstorming– maybe that means talking through an outline with someone before you start writing, or recording yourself thinking out-loud in a voice memo as you walk across campus between classes, or drawing a word web of concepts and questions. There’s no right or wrong, so give yourself permission to do something different!

 

Brainstorming Beyond College Writing

IDEO U Poster of Brainstorming Rules

Brainstorming is a tool with wide applicability. It’s a first step not only in writing, but in any sort of problem-solving or decision making endeavor. Industry careers of all sorts prioritize job applicants who think outside of the box, who are comfortable coming up with new ideas on the spot, whether or not those ideas pan out. Check out this infographic from IDEOU, an online school that grew out of a “global design and innovation company”. Brainstorming in this context is verbal, a team discussion that IDEOU defines as “an activity that will help you generate more innovative ideas. It’s one of many methods of ideation—the process of coming up with new ideas—and it’s core to the design thinking process.” That sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it!

 

 

Resources:

-The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center has a great list of different techniques for brainstorming.

-Book a session with a Writing Tutor today if you want to brainstorm together!

What is the “Writing Process”?

January 27, 2025 / / 0 Comments

We talk a lot about process here at the Writing Center, but what exactly does that mean? The process of writing is just transferring information from your brain into squiggly marks on a screen that then turn into information in someone else’s brain, right? Well…

If you signed up today to run a marathon in three months, you’d probably do some things to prepare. You might buy some good running shoes…and if you did, you’d have to break them in before setting out on a run….and if you weren’t used to running, you might start by walking every day and then adding in some light jogging… and you might ask a friend to join you to keep you motivated… then you might join a running club to start getting into the habit of extending your pace etc. Oh, and you’d definitely curate a running play-list!

The point is, there is a lot that goes into running a marathon that you don’t see the day of the race (and without all of that, the race itself would be even more painful that it already is!) Writing is the same. We spend so much time looking at the final product (literature, journal essays, polished speeches) that we don’t always acknowledge the messy stuff that goes into creating that product.

The good news is that the Writing Process doesn’t involve getting up before the sun rises (I mean, it can, you do you) and forcing yourself to get on the treadmill or brave the elements. We tend to break down the things that happen before a piece of writing materializes on your screen into a couple of different stages. And I will admit, they do take time and effort:

The first stage we talk about is invention, in other words, coming up with an idea. That idea usually (always) changes and evolves and slips away from you and morphs into something totally different, but there is always a moment when you say to yourself some version of “what am I going to write about?” Sometimes it takes a loooong time to answer that question for the first time. And just because we name it first doesn’t mean it really comes first– you might find that you can only get to that moment by experimenting with writing down some ideas or doing some pre-writing.

Pre-writing is the wacky stuff. This is the brainstorming, the word mapping, the annotations and highlighting on a text, the conversation with your mom at 7pm (or your roommate at 2am) about the assignment. It’s the outlining and the half finished sentences that might work but might not. Usually it looks something like this:

The shitty first draft is an integral part of the writing process, absolutely 100% as important as the thing you turn in. Crucially, it is not the thing you turn it. Anne Lamott describes it as ” the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.” Call it what you like, shitty first draft, stream of consciousness, free-writing– the main thing is that at this stage you have to make an agreement with yourself not to “edit as you go”. You’ve got to look yourself in the eye and say, “You can write whatever you want, I won’t judge you.”

A lot of us never give ourselves permission to just write without adding another word or phrase to the sentence (“I have to write beautifully/enough that I have something to turn in by midnight/intelligently/without showing that I really don’t know anything about this topic/well enough to get an A on this essay”). Try it out. Because once you write a draft without judgement, you have something to work with, something to revise.

Revision is not, as a lot of us have been taught, fixing word choice and double-checking grammar (that, along with formatting, is editing). Revision is rewriting. This is when you look at that shitty first draft and say to yourself, “Good job. Now lets see what we can do with this.” Revision involves asking lots of questions, trying out different things (different words and phrases, yes, but also maybe a different organization, a different angle, maybe even a different answer to the main question).

Because of the nature of a screen, these stages of writing are presented as a list that looks chronological: we start with invention, we do some pre-writing, we draft, we revise, then we edit. In reality, writing resists that sort of linear cleanliness. Writing is messy, there’s nothing clean or linear about it. It’s more of a Mobius strip than anything else. There’s no right or wrong place to start (well, the wrong place to start is the one that prevents you from moving freely through your ideas) and more likely than not, the “pre-writing” is something you’ll return to again and again.

These are phrases that will probably occur in later blog posts. The key take away is that writing is a lot more than translating information from one brain to another via words on a page. Stay tuned for next week’s Writing Studio blog post: how to brainstorm and why!

Welcome!

January 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Welcome, writers!

This first post on the Dickinson Writing Studio blog comes as the Spring 2025 semester kicks off with sub-freezing temperatures and a blanket of snow. On days like these, we have to conserve energy by bundling up and moving slowly– everything seems to take longer in the snow, whether that’s getting out of bed in the morning or walking from one class to another. All those layers of insulation mean we’re constantly pulling coats and hats and scarves off and on and off again, and everything just takes that much more effort. But with this weather also comes the potential for an impromptu snowball fight on the quad or a snowman peering out over Britton Plaza. Some of us will pause and remember what it was like to wake up to a snow day as a child, while others among will marvel at experiencing snow for the first time. Snow changes the world around us in startling ways.

Writing is not so different! It can feel like a chore or an obstacle, something that slows things down and highlights your anxieties and vulnerabilities; at the same it can feel like permission granted to be creative, to experiment and take risks, to interact with the world and your own thoughts in a different way. Both of these things can be (and usually are!) true at the same time.

The Germans and Scandinavians say there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing. In the Writing Center, we say there are no bad writers, only bad writing processes.* Over the course of this semester, this weekly blog post will be here to help you develop your personal writing process. We will share tips and resources as well as best practices for writing in a number of different genres. For now, we hope you enjoy the snow and stay warm!

*We don’t actually say that, but we do think every writer can benefit from figuring out what works for them individually and learning how to avoid the common writing pitfalls that lead to imposter syndrome and writer’s block!

I always trust a pencil. Ink is too indelible and it inhibits me. There is comfort in knowing that my first stab can be erased. Only in pencil do I dare the blank page.

Michael O'Siadhail

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

Stephen King
 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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