Fastwriting

The Curious Researcher, by Bruce Ballenger is a very insightful book in exploiring techniques and styles of research-based writing. One of the techniques they encourage is called fastwriting. This is basically spontaneous writing, spewing whatever comes to mind onto a page for a set amount of time, in this case 3 minutes, and ensuring that you simply do not stop until that time is up. This encourages thinking through your writing as opposed to simply having it thought out before you even start. So... I'm gonna lay out two fastwrites as responses to two different statements brought up in The Curious Researcher.

The first statement: You're writing mostly for the instructor.
Time: 3 minutes

"Writing is a tricky thing because it can be used for so many different reasons. It is necessary for just about everything we do in life. We we study we need to write in order to respond to what we have learnt and display to our professors or examiners that we we have grasped an understanding of what they are teaching. The opposite side of this is that as, learners we need to be able to read what others have written for us. So writing can be for responding as well as educating. As students we generally find that when we write it is for the purpose of pleasing our professors or fulfilling requirement, but I believe that this is a little bit of a problem, because writing should be far more significant than this. Writing should be for the benefit of the writer as much as it is for the benefit of the reader. we should be able to find enjoyment in our writing in such a way that writing an essay to fulfill a requirement set out by an instructor is something far more meaningful than simply fulfilling that requirement or receiving a grade: it should also create a sense of happiness and enjoyment for us as we write."

The second statement: Pretty much everything you read in textbooks is true.
Time: 3 minutes

"Going through school I obviously trusted everything I learnt from a textbook. The teachers had set it, meaning that they thought it was pretty good, plus it was written by geniuses in their field. Subjects like physics, biology and chemistry were an absolute given. who was I to argue with the writers in these fields. When I got to college, however, and started studying something I was actually passionate about (Theology) I realized that there are some textbooks out there that are not very good. In fact there are some that are simply awful. Some of them talk about things that are simply untrue and some just miss the point in certain areas, but it became pretty tricky to know which writers, and which textbooks were actually worth looking at. My only guess is that this is not simply the case for the theological field. I'm guessing that many different fields have the same problem, I was just never knowledgeable enough to notice it."

Fastwriting is actually a pretty easy thing and I'm quite impressed with the way it encourages thinking throughout the process.