Writing Out of the Box
By Annelise Heinz, from Teaching Commons, Feb. 13, 2015
In this article, I explain the writing workshops I designed for history graduate students that were effectively laboratories for new ways of approaching the writing process. These workshops emphasized experimentation, iteration, and collaboration. Participants described discovering the utility of working through ideas with diverse methods and feeling less isolated in the long dissertation period.
Jumpstarting the Writing Process
By Annelise Heinz, from Teaching Commons, May 15, 2014
Many think of teaching writing as improving the writing itself, post-production. Yet, many writers find the most challenging stage to be the production phase. I have generated an experimental approach to supporting writers engaged in long and independent projects, which lack the sense of urgency provided by short-term deadlines and which demand rigorous and challenging development of ideas. My method is based on targeted interventions that I call “jumpstarts.” A jumpstart is essentially an action-oriented prompt that gives a writer a very specific structure to engage with her ideas, with the added productive constraint of a time limit.
How Writing Leads to Thinking (And not the other way around)
By Lynn Hunt, from the Art of History column of the February 2010 issue of Perspectives on History
An absolute must-read article for any writer, student, or teacher. "Writing means many different things to me but one thing it is not: writing is not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in my mind. Writing is a magical and mysterious process that makes it possible to think differently." See the full text here