Coldhearted Scientist: “Free 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.
Dame Eleanor Hull: This tendency in my students makes me absolutely crazy: they 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).
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I think with undergraduates the cherry picking, etc. is because they can’t read at the college level yet. Took me a while when I went back to college in my 40s, and I thought I was a good reader.
Yes, it is that, but they are also taught to do it explicitly by these writing teacher types, it is unfortunate.
No, this year’s batch could read fine, but they believed very deeply that you start with a point of view and only then do you try to find the evidence to support it.
Hmm. do they have any training in rhetoric?
Mine, I would not say so. But the professors who teach them to write this way are experts in “Rhetoric and Composition.”
As one of those freshman writing teachers, we talk a lot about how we knock ourselves silly to shift them out of “debate” (take a position and support it) mode and to enter academic research, source evaluation, close reading, etc. What can I say? At the end of a 14-week course, that they do not have to repeat if they’ve earned a C-, maybe 2/15 (3 sections taught) have got it. This writing thing? Team effort. Four years. Discipline-specific. And I tend to barely listen when they tell me what some other professor has told them is “good writing.” First, there’s no such universal thing; there’s writing for the context, and they are usually too inexperienced to know that. So I explain, because what is good for their business class is not good for their English class, and vice-versa. For that business class? They may have to cherry-pick and prove. For that English class? Not so much. Lab reports are very different from ethnographies. Etc.
I’d never deprive colleagues from griping about the failures, though. We all do it. I like to blame No Child Left Behind and testing regimes that discourage risk-taking, myself. We’re a decade in, and I think we’re seeing the consequences in anxious writers who have trouble learning new approaches — they will not automatically be good at the new thing, and they have been penalized for not performing well in a testing world.
Also: I don’t use freewriting. But I don’t hate it; I’ve just never found it essential or useful for my purposes.
You are brilliant, dclioness.