Browsing through ‘Writing Successful Textbooks’ by Anthony Haynes (A and C Black, 2001, London), the writer advises potential authors to ‘free write’. That is, to write for a set period each day (15/30 minutes perhaps) and to just write without thinking about punctuation, structure etc during that time. Just write. The fine tuning can be addressed after the exercise.
I thought I’d try this (in an adapted version) with my Japanese students and asked them to write a paragraph in English about any subject without worrying about vocabulary, grammar etc.
They quite enjoyed it and it produced work with very few errors. When the errors were brought to their attention, they all managed to self-correct. I also invited them to show their work to the others in the class, so they could see the different writing styles. I’d forgotten about this activity until I reread this post.