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Book excerpt: The 16 essays in this book provide a theoretical underpinning for freewriting. Sheryl I. Fontaine opens the book with a description of the organization, purpose, and content of students’ 10-minute unfocused freewriting. Pat Belanoff discusses the relationship between skilled and unskilled student writers. Richard H. Haswell analyzes forms of freewriting. Lynn Hammond describes the focused freewriting strategies used in legal writing and in the analysis of poetry. Joy Marsella and Thomas L. Hilgers suggest ways of teaching freewriting as a heuristic. Diana George and Art Young show what teachers learned about the writing abilities of three engineering students through freewriting journals. Anne E. Mullin seeks to determine whether freewriting lives up to claims made for it. Barbara W. Cheshire assesses the efficacy of freewriting. James W. Pennebaker checks the short- and long-term effects of freewriting on students’ emotional lives. Ken Macrorie notes that freewriting means being freed to use certain powers. Peter Elbow shows how authors use freewriting. Robert Whitney tells "why I hate to freewrite." Karen Ferro considers her own freewriting, showing how it leads to a deeper self-understanding. Chris Anderson discusses the qualities in freewriting that we should maintain in revision. Burton Hatlen shows the parallels between writing projective verse and freewriting. Sheridan Blau describes the results of experiments with invisible writing.