Initial impressions

Just this morning Kalinago (whose session I had the pleasure of catching at TESOL Spain last weekend) blogged here and earlier here about dealing with errors and emergent language. How can we catch it before it flies away into oblivion?

The blogs and comments reminded me of this simple technique - initial writing.

You simply turn this...

into this:

The text in this case was my recasting of a student's tale, but it can come from anywhere. I often use initial-notation as a kind of shorthand to capture my own monologues as I speak to the class - without ever writing the full version.