Free-response essays are generally considered to be easier to write than other topics, a favor to the student, if you will; however, free-response essays can be the hardest kind to write. The advantages of free-response are many, but they only work for some people. Free-response essays allow the student more freedom to be creative and write about topics which interest him. Also, the teacher does not need to assign a topic himself. Plus, teachers can say they are being nice, giving the students a break.
Unfortunately, excepting some few students who already know something they really want to write about, many students find free-response essays the most difficult kind to write. It is no surprise, really. The guide-lines for an essay topic, even just slight, basic guidelines, help students organize their thoughts. It is very difficult even to start an essay when there are an infinite amount of topics to choose from. Topics that may seem like a good idea at the beginning end up leading nowhere, and topics which the student may dismiss right at the beginning could actually work into very interesting essays.
Take the Lady Gaga prompt we were given earlier in the year. Most students, when given the opportunity for a free-writing prompt, would never dare to use Lady Gaga music video’s rhetoric as an essay topic, for fear that the teacher would laugh at them, or worse, fail them without even reading the essay. Free-writing essays could actually lower the amount of creative thought put into students’ essays because they may revert automatically to common topics which have been examined again and again. They may feel that to be taken seriously, they must pick a serious - and potentially uninteresting - topic.
It is helpful for students when teachers qualify what they want for an essay. Saying you can write about anything as long as it is not “insubstantial venting or general silliness” is really hindering and not helpful. Almost any argument could be considered venting, and the insubstantial part of it is completely subjective. Liz’s post discussed the importance of sleep and the serious problems facing modern teens who cannot find enough time for a full night’s sleep. Liz’s post is convincing and logical, but to an unsympathetic reader, it could be viewed as a mere complaint that she is tired and that teachers assign too much homework. Substance is in the eye of the reader. Also, the term “general silliness” is about as vague as it gets. My post could be considered silly, but it is certainly not general silliness. Any silliness here is very specific.
Laura, like I told Caeleigh, I love irony. I see a lot of irony in your post. Personally, I agree with everything you write. Your first paragraph is a perfect breakdown of the rationale behind this assignment. In addition, I too dislike open response, “free write” type assignments. Lastly, I agree that some of my assignment was vague. The irony is that despite my personal agreement with all of your analysis, your post actually reaffirms the importance of free writing. Mr. Collyer and Dr. Walsh use free writing, or journaling, as major parts of their approaches to writing instruction. I had always been skeptical, until I read your post. I fear that students, like you and I, who seek guidelines, have been trapped by an artificial pedagogical construct necessary in high school education. Remember, in some twisted way, we’re mass-producing learning. The fact is that after high school, the overwhelming majority of your writing will be some form of free writing. As I think about all of the writing that I have done since high school, I struggle to remember an assignment that had guidelines other than length and mode (i.e. persuasion, exposition, research, narrative, etc.) Actually, the last guided question I responded to was on the teacher certification test. I guess that’s more irony. Even capstone writing assignments like masters theses and doctoral dissertations, which you will write at some point, involve forms of free writing. The ideas, topics, and research are your own. Similarly, professional writers rarely respond to direct prompts or try to fit guidelines other than length. Rather, whether they write fiction or nonfiction, they write about topics that interest them and that they know will interest their readers. In the future, whether you write academic, narrative, journalistic, etc. prose, you will have to generate the topic yourself. Finding that topic becomes the challenge, one that we don’t prepare students for well enough in high school. Of course, the ultimate irony of your post is that you, and your peers, are very good at free writing. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that there is definitely a demand for space to free write. I see no shortage of ideas in any of these posts.
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