A Gaiden Pen

Journaling for Health: Methods that Make it Fun For many years, I taught college level writing, and one technique we explored frequently was freewriting. Freewriting is simply writing like mad without worrying about how it looks or sounds or whether your old English teacher would slap you upside the head for your mistakes. If you want to publish what you've written, sure, go back and clean it all up, but as you're freewriting, you need to let yourself just concentrate on your thoughts and not worry about what anyone else thinks. It's no one's business but yours. I'll never forget one particular student who was combative about having to take a writing class. He was slow to trust; unenthusiastic about the assignments. I had students write a letter to me about who they were as a writer (or why they didn't see themselves as one), and to my surprise, this student stayed for twenty minutes after class, unable to stop writing. When he looked up he was crying. He may ha...