But freewriting can profitably feed class discussion. Students freewriting about a topic, a text, or a question before class discussion have time to collect their thoughts and are thus positioned to take an active part in discussion. Volunteers may be asked to read or summarize what they have written. Or students may be asked to share their freewrites in small groups. Ask students to write letters to you, to each other, to the authors of the works they read, to other historical personages living or dead.
Letters provide a familiar medium within which to express concerns, raise questions, explore ideas.
Letters tend to be far less formal than academic discourse, permitting students to translate the ideas of the course into their own idiom. The conscientious professor will write letters back. Journals can take any number of forms, as I will attempt to show in the next issue of Faculty Focus. What they all have in common, however, is regular informal writing about the subject matter of the course. E-mail journals extend class discussions beyond the confines of the course itself.