A Thought About Writing In General
One of the more interesting activities we have done this year required us to write as much as we possibly could in a five minute span. While I respect the credibility of the noble Dr. Peter Elbow, I think this exercise can be manipulated into something more impactful. Instead of writing a formalized paragraph it could be interesting to write ideas down in a bulleted format in a limited amount of time and then we could develop a paragraph. This essentially allows the writer to challenge his or her mind in a pressed time period while also promoting responsible writing habits because at the end of the day clarity is most important to the reader and to the writing when redrafting. I think it is very easy to develop bad habits especially when word choice is more geared towards quality over quantity. This is just a suggestion and I think the activity definitley had merit and was helpful to me and my expression of ideas.
Although I definitely agree that writing bullet points could have clarified ideas in my writing during this activity, forcing myself to write sentences caused me to link my ideas more readily than if I had simply written bullet points. Also, consistently writing allowed me to explore my train of thoughts on the paper instead of segmenting them into bulleted ideas. Bullet points would help create a concise thesis, but I think Dr. Elbow was trying to explore the process that ultimately results in the thesis rather than the ideas themselves.
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