Freewriting is a drafting strategy used to help writers get ideas out onto the page. In this mixed-methods study, keyboard logging data is collected while participants freewrite. I use Inputlog and other data to explore the question: Does freewriting do what we think it does?""
Freewriting is a drafting strategy commonly used in US classrooms to help students get thoughts out of their head and onto the page. Typical freewriting instructions ask the writer to "speak onto the page," and write without stopping for a fixed period of time. According to Peter Elbow, "The goal [of freewriting] is the easy nonplanning of language and –gradually– easy movement of thinking" (Elbow, 2012, p.148). In Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, Elbow draws on Wally Chafe's intonation units to propose that freewriting to draft and performing text aloud to revise generates a written style with the best qualities of spoken and written language. We are midway in a mixed-methods study that uses interviews, keyboard logging, text analysis, and (in the future) descriptive experience sampling (DES) to explore the questions: "What do we think freewriting does, and does it do what we think it does?" At Writing Research Across Borders (2014), I described Elbow's strategy using an integrated model of language production that incorporates spoken (Levelt,1989 & 2009) and written (Hayes, 2012) forms of language production as well as reading (Rayner et al., 2012). The model predicts that when a person is freewriting (compared to when they are writing in a more typical mode): (1) they will edit less, (2) language bursts associated with revision will decrease, (3) the text produced will become more "speech-like." In the proposed talk, I will present my model of freewriting and evaluate the extent to which the current study data support it. Finally, I will share preliminary results from a time series analysis of the keystroke logging data that I have been developing with my colleague Shu-Min Liao.
