The Writing Center's Guide to Avoiding Writer's Block
Use
freewriting, brainstorming, journal writing, writing to the
limit, or other informal kinds of writing to explore what you already know
about your assignment. You may be pleasantly surprised to discover you
already have a fairly large fund of information on the topic.2. Use the same strategies to explore how you feel about an assignment. If you don't want to do the assignment, such informal writing may help you to determine the source of your resistance.
3. Trick yourself into caring about an assignment by varying your perspective on it. Try writing informally about the topic to several audiences.
4. Write an imaginary dialogue with your instructor about why he or she made this particular assignment.
5. Talk to and work collaboratively with other students in the class. Be sure, however, to move beyond mere complaining about your fate.
6. Break the project down into smaller, more manageable, more easily completed writing tasks.
7. Begin the draft with a focal question that you will attempt to answer in your essay. Write the question in large capital letters across the top of the page or on a post-it stuck next to your computer screen.
8. Talk the paper. Tell someone, even a tape recorder, what you want to say in the essay.
9. Learn to draft directly on a word processor or computer. You can save various versions of the paper, rearrange paragraphs (through cut and paste functions), write in modules, and so forth.
10. Ignore spelling, grammar, and punctuation until much later in your writing process. Do not edit yourself as you write.
11. If drafting without editing is difficult for you, turn off the screen of your computer.
12. Write out the assignment itself, not your paper, as if you were explaining it to a child. Later, do the same thing with your own text.
13. If you do reach a block in your writing, try fast-writing. Freewrite as quickly as you can, to regain the rhythm of writing.
14. If the block recurs, allow the "back of your mind" to take over. Take a walk, run, dance, jump up and down, take a shower then sit down and fast-write.
15. Open a window!
16.Read your paper to someone. What doesn't she or he understand? What seems to be missing?
17. Don't feel you need to write the title and the introduction first. Often, they are the last parts of a paper to be written.
18. Imagine you are telling the paper as a story to a friend. She asks, "And so?" Answer her.
19. Talk to a tutor at the Writing Center!
