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The Freedom that Comes from Restricted
Writing Using Words in Color
Peter Miller
It is perhaps a truism to say that restrictions lay at the heart of the writing process. For
everyone and from the very beginning, learning how to write means, in part, learning to
handle a formidable hierarchy of restrictions.
Regardless of one’s parent culture, one must sufficiently master the physical restrictions
required to hold and manipulate a writing instrument in the appropriate manner. Whether it be
with a brush moving vertically down a column or with a pen or pencil moving horizontally
along a line in either direction, one needs a considerable apprenticeship to make the
appropriate letters or shapes in the appropriate sizes, so that the physical act of writing
becomes second nature and the results legible to oneself and others.
Along with the physical restrictions on learning how to write, the linguistic conventions of the
language — its spelling, grammar and punctuation — present new challenges and restraints.
The further we move along in our educational system, the greater and more complex are the
restrictions that await us. Who has not been asked by a teacher at some point in their
education, “What is your focus?” or been told to “narrow your subject”, in order to find the
sensible boundaries of one’s thoughts. Indeed, doesn’t one ask oneself these questions each
time we write in order to discover what it is we want to express?
Later, on the college level, one is required to negotiate even more formal aspects of writing,
leading to a host of new restrictions. It is in teaching these new restrictions that many
composition teachers spend much of their time and attention. Even the most casual survey of
composition textbooks currently in circulation reveals how seriously the educational
establishment takes the teaching of these restrictions. Such restrictions include those of
structure (the word, the phrase, the clause, the sentence, the paragraph, the introduction, the
thesis statement, the transitional sentence, the conclusion); restrictions of rhetorical mode
(description, narration, argument, explanation, analysis, comparison) restrictions of form (a
personal essay, an argument, a review, an explication de texte, a larger critical essay, a
comparison, a research paper); restrictions governing conventions for citation and
bibliography; restrictions of tone, style, and appropriate language; and finally, restrictions of
time.
Responding perhaps to the pressures of these manifold restrictions, over the past twenty-five
years a shift has occurred in composition theory and practice away from the view that what
matters most in writing is a glisteningly perfect product which reveals a subtle mastery of the
rules, regulations, and rhetorical modes. A new emphasis has emerged, which involves an
awareness of the entire writing process, not just its products. It includes starting with the
widest possible focus and only later narrowing the subject, and exploring the freedom and
sanctity of private writing, journal keeping, and “free-writing”, as developed by Peter Elbow
and others, which asks writers temporarily to put aside matters of structure, organization and
correctness to keep the pen moving continuously to get their thoughts down on paper. This
way to literacy is seen more through work on increasing one’s fluency, with a growing
confidence of being able to put one’s thoughts and feelings into written form, than through the
replication of the various models of the sentence, the paragraph, or the essay.
For some writers, the “free-writing” approach to fluency has been truly “freeing”, but not for
all. Some find the “freedom” of “free-writing” a restriction in itself and are unable to compose

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fluently. Moreover, it can send a message that students know to be false, if not misleading,
that conventions don’t really matter.
Instead of teaching writing as the mastery of a hierarchy of restrictions or as temporarily
bypassing them in the interest of unfettered expression, one can take an altogether different
approach by addressing oneself to several questions: “What restrictions can I put before my
students as writers that would free them to produce the greatest amount of writing? What is
the least I can do as a writing teacher to produce the greatest “yield” from my students, both
in their writing and in their awareness of themselves as writers?” Seen in this way, restriction
would paradoxically liberate apprentice writers rather than confine them. A final question one
could ask is, “How would the Words in Color charts contribute to this enterprise?”
The forms that restricted writing exercises would take in response to these questions would be
virtually unlimited. To begin with, one is free to use as “prompts” all that is within the
domain of the writer’s inner life — all wondering, doubting, thinking, judging, deciding,
questioning, inward picturing, outward observing, talking to oneself, realizing, calculating,
imagining, remembering, knowing, and feeling. A glance at the Words in Color charts
presents the following words: think / doubt / laugh / worry / love / hate / cry / refuse / hope /
seek / now / question / listen / believe / if / when / why / what / where / oh / to suggest just a
few. From these words, one can create simple “prompts” or restricted writing phrases, such
as: “I think that...”, “I doubt that...”, “I laugh when...”, “I worry about (that)...”, “I love (hate)
it when...”, “I cry when...”, “I refuse to believe that...”, “I really believe that...”, “What if I...”,
“When I was...”, “Oh, no! ...” and so on.
To start students writing, one can easily combine these restricted writing “prompts” with
certain features of “free-writing”, namely, the request to keep the pen moving continuously
for a certain amount of time, the promise that their writing will remain private, and the
acceptability of not telling the truth, that is, of creating stories. Given such delineaments,
these restricted writing exercises characteristically open writers to the inner resources of
memory, knowledge, experience, perception, intuition, feelings and imagination from which
all writing springs. Moreover, the restrictions themselves both contain and free writers to
explore these areas of their awareness.
Perhaps one the most extreme variants of this kind of restricted writing “prompt” would be to
ask the students to pick just one word from the Words in Color charts about which to write,
representing the “least one would offer”. Of course, one need not use Words in Color to
proceed with this or other restricted writing activities, but since one can easily bring any
single chart or all 20 charts to class, they afford a ready supply of words. Here, for example, is
a short piece of writing on the self-selected word, Oh!:
“Oh! I love exclamations! Yeah! Do it! Wow! Infinite interpretations! Oh! can be happy, sad,
angry. Oh! can be pleasure. Oh! can be pain. But Oh! is always change. Oh! is a beginning, a
point of departure. Oh! I hate my job. Oh! I love to write. Oh! we’re in love. Oh! how sappy.
Oh, no!! Oh! came to me immediately, not immediately. After I knew we had to choose one
word, but before Peter said to think about it. I refused to think. I had my word. I’m reading
Hamlet in Shakespeare class. Oh, man. Is Oh! all over the place. I never get sick of it, but if I
were an actor, it would be hard to say. How do you not get contrived with Oh!? Oh! is like a
physical thing. You feel it in your chest. Part grunt, part word. Basic. So Oh! always seems to
be qualified. Oh! alone is powerful."
Apart from the capacity to produce so much writing, an equally significant part of the “yield”
is the students’ capacity to recognize what is truly fundamental about writing. One needs to
ask: “What did you become aware of while you were writing?” and “What did you bring with
you (inside you) in order to write?” By listening attentively to what students say and
cultivating the answers over time, one can produce a growing array of awarenesses about the

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complexities of writing. Such awarenesses can come to include:
▪ trusting and enjoying the abundance and speed of one’s mind
▪ being and staying open, yield to the challenge, and give it one’s full attention knowing
▪ that one can start anywhere and go anywhere
▪ bringing one’s willingness, energy, interest and curiosity
▪ trusting one’s intuition and perception and using them to help accomplish the task
▪ picturing countless possibilities almost simultaneously
▪ putting aside external and internal distractions
▪ listening to various voices within oneself and carrying on an inner dialogue
▪ suspending final judgement about the value of one’s writing
▪ taking pleasure in exploring the pictures of one’s imagination
▪ enjoying the pleasure of one’s own words and the sounds of the language
▪ using one’s patience and persistence and giving the task the time it takes
▪ seeing where one might have lost one’s way and returning to the task
▪ asking oneself questions
▪ being aware of one’s uniqueness and that of one’s writing
▪ being aware that one is in a process that proceeds in time.
Over the course of a semester, students are able to develop a more complete and complex list
of attributes, capacities, resources and behaviors that comprise their own “writing process”
and return to it as a source of growth.
Once students appreciate that any single word can arouse many possibilities for writing, it
becomes easier to use the charts as a means to create any number of writing “games” or
activities. For instance, one can ask students to: write as many statements as possible using
only one chart; write a story using as many words as possible that appear on two charts and as
few other words as possible; write statements using words starting with the same sound but
with different spellings; write “tongue-twisters”; write statements that contain the same
shape(s) but that tell us to make different sounds; write a rhyming couplet using the words of
two charts; find a word from one of the charts and see how many other words one can create
from it.
One can impose even greater restrictions on the writing activity by limiting the number of
charts and introducing an arbitrary form, such as a telegram. One may also need to say that
writers are free to add letter(s) for plurals, third person singular or past tense endings,
pronouns and other “small” words, or some punctuation in order to fulfill the assignment.
Here are examples of some telegrams written in response to such a request, using chart
fifteen, which contains the following words: “ear, hear, tear, theater, read, heard, read (past
tense), eat, believe, sieve, friend, receipt, meant, seize, great, please, vein, gauge, pear, create,
ocean, tear, pearl, their, means, break, anxiety, treasure, anxious, exaggerate, examination”:
▪ Their friend believes treasures create great anxiety.
▪ Hear anxiety, friend. Anxious examination, Please believe. No great exaggeration.
▪ Please read examinations. Great anxiety. Break their heart. Tear treasure.
▪ Please read examination. Friend anxious.
▪ Great pearls. No exaggeration. Believe friend.
▪ Please read and examine receipt. With great anxiety, my treasured pearls create theatrical
read.
▪ Heart torn like vein through sieve.
▪ Ocean of treasure. No pearls.
▪ Anxious friend seized by heart tear.
In most cases, writers respond similarly to the restrictions imposed by the Words in Color
charts. Virtually everyone starts to write with little hesitation and, feeling they have

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something to say, keep going with relative ease and comfort. Despite restrictions, writers are
free to explore their creativity and the contents of their own imagination. Because of the
“game-like” activity, students can bring their interest, attention, curiosity and energy to the
task and are willing to jump in, stay focused and concentrate. After students read and
collectively display their telegrams, they are generally surprised by the amount and variety of
words they were able to generate, by how little is required for them to express themselves and
that the “yield” of the exercise is not in the “prompt”, but in them.
Finally, one can use the Words in Color charts to work on writing in any number of ways in
conjunction with spelling, reading and language. For example, the teacher may ask students to
come to the board and write as many words that come to mind containing the vowel sound /o/
(the leafy green color on the Fidel), as in to, too and two. As students continue to offer more
and more words within each of the various spellings for the sound, (some of them possibly
wrong), the teacher may stop the “game” at any point to ask students any number of questions
about spelling, language, or what they are becoming aware of to play the “game”. For
instance, it may not be readily apparent that there are twelve different spellings for the sound,
that some spellings are more commonly used than others, or even that certain words share the
same sound, say, lieutenant and pneumatic. After a sufficient “pool” of words has been
created, one may then ask students to write sentences, telegrams or haiku poems (explained
briefly, if necessary), using only the words in the “pool”. While one might expect the
contrary, working within even greater restrictions of a particular sound and a particularly rigid
poetic form seems to exhilarate students to compose with ease. Here are a few examples of
haiku developed out of the word “pool” of /o/:
a. The shoe, the one I choose to give you in lieu of a boot, is too blue.
b. Two new, true-blue shoes choose whose to lose, whose to schmooze too loose for a goose.
c. Some dude threw into the lieutenant’s window blue some soup, some soup, OO!
Implicit in the way students work on their writing with Words in Color is the way teachers
use the charts to teach. The approach makes certain assumptions about students, writing and
teaching. First, the teacher agrees to accept students where they are as people and as writers
and to deal with them in the here and now. (It may be necessary at the start of the course to
create a questionnaire which brings to light the habits, attitudes and feelings that students
have about themselves as writers and to get a sample of their writing.) The teacher also
considers the teaching of writing an on-going process that takes time and requires growing
awareness. In this process, it is understood that mistakes are necessary and inevitable;
consequently, perfection is neither demanded nor required. Finally, the Words in Color charts
function to cultivate the student’s awareness of those inner capacities and reservoirs which
promote the conviction essential to all writing that one has something to say and the means to
say it.
This way of working as a writing teacher requires patience and time, the willingness to ask
many questions, to allow students to reflect on what they have done and said, to listen
carefully to what they say about themselves, to bring as few assumptions about “the writing
process” into the discussion and to work empirically. In a number of his writings, Caleb
Gattegno describes this kind of approach as “the subordination of teaching to learning”, and
in his book What We Owe Children discusses how one works in this way in the teaching of
reading, mathematics and the social sciences.
In our more immediate context of the Words in Color Charts, they can be seen as a rich and
flexible instrument for restricted writing exercises, that paradoxically free the writer to
compose fluently, focus attention on what is truly fundamental about the writing process and
cultivate one’s awareness of those reservoirs of content from which all writing emerges.

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Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
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Gattegno, Caleb. What We Owe Children: The Subordination of Teaching to Learning. New
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© Peter Miller College of Staten Island City University of New York
The Science of Education in Questions – N° 15 - February 1997
"The Freedom that Comes from Restricted Writing Using Words in Color" by Peter Miller is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License.