Oh look, it's me, in the Marist library. This photo was taken on August 26th. For reasons that are truly inexplicable to me, as I started actually putting this project together, I thought "well, I'll take a selfie every week in the place I'm writing and I can put that in my blog as part of my multimodal project, and that won't be weird at all." Well, past J.R.- it's weird. To my reading public, namely Dr. Wittstock, I apologize for the following posts that will be littered with me awkwardly staring at the camera.
Alright, on to the real stuff.
Each week I would record a "free write" in my Composition Theory class and each week, after class, I would go somewhere and I would assess either the free write, or my week in general, or both. So, while I am including a process journal when I turn in this assignment, for context I'm going to include those free writes here in the blog posts as well. There may be some editing depending on how much I want the internet to know about my inner monologue, but, for the most part, it's going to be the raw unedited versions of those things. Beyond that, I will be making it a point to tie certain theories from class that we discussed into my developments and analyses of my writing in the process journal, although this may not be present in all posts. Make sense? I hope so!
08/26/25
Free Write in Literary Composition Class: My understanding of Composition Studies is that it exists to enhance our abilities as writers, but also as readers in that we can ascertain how certain writers built their texts and ideas. It differs from other fields in that, while it can be argued that the contents of a text is always important, it becomes secondary while we evaluate the manner in which the text was constructed.
Analysis/Reflection:
I’m actually analyzing this first free write way after the fact because I genuinely forgot about doing it, however, I remember this: I had absolutely no idea what a free write was. This was my third class back in school, and I remember Dr. Wittstock gave the prompt and everyone just started typing away. The prompt was, essentially, “What do you think Composition Theory is?” To be honest, I didn’t really have any idea and I was absolutely terrified I was going to have to read this out loud, or turn it in. So I sat there, mostly sweating, staring intently at my computer, and eventually shit out these two sentences as a Hail Mary in case I had to say something.
The good news, I now know what a “free write” is.
Theory Application:
This immediately brings Peter Elbow's "Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience" to mind. Specifically, "... our minds fill with thoughts of what the intended reader will criticize or object to... our writing becomes tangled. Sometimes we get so tied in knots that we cannot even figure out what we think" (Elbow 52). That is the exact scenario I was faced with for this first free write. As I sat and considered how what I was writing would be relayed to my instructor, or my peers, and that I would appear to be uneducated. It caused me to be unable to think of anything to write as I was so focused on what people's interpretation of the writing, and of me, would be.
Elbow, Peter. “Closing my eyes as I speak: An argument for ignoring audience.”
College English, vol. 49, no. 1, 1 Jan. 1987, pp. 50–69,
https://doi.org/10.58680/ce198711506.
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