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it grows out of doing The Method, further developing the paragraph that explains why you chose one repetition, strand or binary as most important;

in analyzing the chosen passage, writers normally paraphrase key words; and

they keep the writing going by insistently asking “So what?” at the ends of paragraphs.

Notice how the writers use these tools in the examples that follow.

Passage-based Focused Freewriting: An Example

Sometimes, in-class writings are done in class in response to a prompt. The prompt for this freewrite was, “how does Obama’s inaugural address compare with his election night victory speech?” Notice how the writer chooses to find most interesting.

What was most interesting to me about Obama’s inaugural speech was his use of the collective first person—“we,” “our,” “us,” etc.—as opposed to the singular “I.” This is especially different from his victory speech, which did not make use of the singular “I” and addressed the audience as “you.” These pronoun choices are actually very conducive to the tone of each speech. Obama’s victory speech was a victory speech—it was meant to be joyful, hopeful, optimistic, and of course thankful…so every use of “you” is not accusatory by rather congratulatory and proud—e.g., “this is because of you,” “you have done this,” “this is your victory.”

On the other hand, Obama’s inaugural speech was by and large a more somber piece of writing—as the President said to George Stephanopolous, he wanted to capture that moment in history as exactly as possible. “You” here is not the American public as in the victory speech; rather, “you” is any “enemy” of America. And “I,” it seems, has become “we.” This choice automatically makes Obama the voice of society, as though speaking for every American. This is a really subtle but smart choice to make, because the listener or reader is hearing everything he says as his or her own position. Using that collective first person also puts Obama on the same level as everyone else, and when he does blame America for its own problems, the “our’s” and “we’s” soften the blow. The “you’s” here are harsh and accusatory but meant for that great, terrible, unnamed enemy to “our” freedom and happiness.

I found a lot more obvious echoes to Lincoln in this speech as compared to the victory speech, coupled with earth imagery—for example, “we cannot hallow this ground” (Lincoln) vs. “what the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted” (Obama). This ties America to the actual physical land. It romanticizes and makes permanent the ideas of our country—a nice setting behind all of the nation’s troubles—while simultaneously adding to the so-desired degree of “timelessness” of Obama’s first inaugural address.

You can sense the writer, Molly Harper, gathering steam here as she begins to make connections in her evidence, yet her rhetorical analysis seems to spring naturally from simple observation of Obama’s pronouns and then the significance of the contrast between them in the two speeches she is comparing.

Passage-based Focused Freewriting: Another Example

Below is an example of a student’s exploratory writing on an essay by the twentiethcentury African-American writer Langston Hughes. The piece is a twenty-minute reflection on two excerpts. Most notable about this piece, perhaps, is the sheer number of interesting ideas. That may be because the writer continually returns to the language of the original quotes for inspiration. She is not restricted by maintaining a single and consistent thread. It is interesting though, how as the freewrite progresses, a primary focus (on the second of her two quotes) seems to emerge.

Passages from “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes

“But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tomtom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman