This page collects teaching ideas and examples related to the freewriting tool available for instructors at UNC, Chapel Hill. For information about downloading this and other tools see the CITE Instructional Tool Distribution Page. For an opportunity to experiment with this tool, see the SITES Instructional Tool Forge.

Freewriting Examples and Ideas

Freewriting pages can be use in a number of ways to benefit a writing class. As a brainstorming device, they provide a useful way of generating pre-writing ideas for a formal paper or of simply exploring a topic for discussion or sharing some thoughts. They can also be used to survey students about their ideas or about class activities. You can see some examples of how the freewriting tool has been used below.

Daniel Anderson has used the freewriting tool to assess class activities. See responses to a class Web building activity in this example.

Freewriting modules can also be used to reflect on class topics. In this course for potential teachers, a freewriting assignment asked students to explore the qualities of good teachers.

This example show a freewriting assignment that was given to enable students to prewrite about an upcoming paper topic.

Here is a freewriting module that was used in conjunction with a beginning-of-the-semester ice breaking assignment.

SITES: Department of English University of North Carolina sites@unc.edu     (919)-962-8480 Daniel Anderson, Director