Beach ch. 12

The last reading! Teachers can assign students informal writing to help students think before they are expected to produce polished, determined, and definitive work. Students can record their thoughts through freewriting, notes, lists, journal entries, maps, diagrams, blogs, or even artwork. This type of writing should be spontaneous, exploratory, tentative, subjective, expressive, and even contradictory. In my own experience with informal writing, it has allowed me to materialize my thoughts without judging the quality of my work or ideas. Some of my best writing has sprung from informal writing. Often, when I use informal writing to direct my formal writing, I will only keep a the basic idea and maybe a few sentences—revised, of course—of my informal writing.