As we know, I am against free writing. I favor recreational or nonacademic writing, not free writing, for practice, and research notes and abstracts, not rambling “prewriting” to gather my thoughts. I became aware of free writing as a requirement too late, and I have never learned to use it — I find it exhausting and distracting, and it leads me to dead ends. I do free write in blog comments, however, and it helps me think.
In a comment years ago, I theorized the origin of free writing. It might come from freshman composition and specifically, from those rhetoric and composition experts who do not think freshmen should write on literature, yet are comfortable assigning them to write, say, an ethnography (as though they were trained ethnographers themselves). Students allegedly write in a number of disciplines and genres but since neither they nor their teachers have specific expertise in these, what they are actually writing all semester is as a set of personal essays.
Now, free writing works well to start personal essays. Good personal essays are hard to write and the students may not have a lot of material that is obvious to them as such, so free writing must be assigned to get them started.
To give free writing a shape, a lot of editing is needed; that is where the peer review process comes in. Most beginning undergraduates are not ready to peer-edit research-based papers, but all can respond to a piece of free writing about a life, find interesting passages, make suggestions on where to cut and thicken, and develop strategies of argumentation.
So a formula arises: freshman writing taught on this model fairly requires free writing. It follows from there that free writing is necessary for all writing. I notice what my students have been taught in their English classes: develop an argument, and then find citations that will support it. I have difficulty convincing them that this is not actually research, but I convince them.
As I wrote that last paragraph I realized that this was how I was told I should write my dissertation. I did not understand it — I was teaching sophomore, not freshman courses by then, and I did not know about this new, non-research writing model.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I also loved this exchange:
August 15, 2008: http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-makes-you-write.html
Profacero: “writing is just stewing and will only ruin your thought process unless you have already decided what you are doing. Until such time as your first line comes to you unannounced, and you know what the content of your last paragraph is going to be, you are much better off just meditating as far as I am concerned.”
Undine: “The whole freewriting thing sounds good (write down whatever until you discover your topic), but, like you, I feel as though each sentence somehow casts the course of the next one and requires huge amounts of time to write. If I go down the wrong path by freewriting, my thoughts have gone in an entirely different direction, too, and they might not get back to my original track again.”
About this post in particular, this tendency in my students makes me absolutely crazy: ” I notice what my students have been taught in their English classes: develop an argument, and then find citations that will support it.” This is the biggest problem I have with teaching the close reading, which does not even require the sort of research that means going to the library, only that they LOOK at what is in front of them. But instead of reading, they cherry-pick bits. *Sometimes* I convince some of them this is not how to do it, but I have had one student for two courses this year and he still doesn’t grasp the principle.
I think students just aren’t taught to do research any more. We would do them a huge favor if we taught that. As usual, the question is time and energy. I did it very successfully with a class of fewer than 10 this spring, but I am really not sure I could do it for 30, not on our mainly non-residential campus where most students are working and many have children (i.e., it is difficult to find time for individual conferences outside of class time).
*Thank you* for finding that.
It is absolutely shocking that we already had these things figured out back then. I am going to apply them from now on.
It is amazing, but I guess it shows that it is difficult to act and to keep acting on insights. Our work then is to bring our lives into conformance with what we know, not what we are told.
Five years ago, early fall 2008, that was the moment at which I had started climbing out of my really bad slump, I was having a lot of insights and memories on how to do things. I’m closer to actually acting on those ideas daily now, much closer, but still … I want to get closer yet.