Peter Elbow

This is a book of some stature and is held in high esteem, so I suppose I commit something like heresy when I find myself mystified as to why--and articulate the question. Professor Elbow, if I understand him correctly, is a proponent of "process writing," which is all to the good. While I am in general skeptical of a pure process approach (for I am, alas, what some would call, hyperbolically, a "grammar nazi"), I see its merits. My problems with this book are twofold: first there is the argument about process writing, which I submit is overstated, and perhaps a bit too personalized (the upright pronoun is ubiquitous in this book) for my tastes. The second is that for such a slim volume about writing, there is an awful lot of prolixity afoot here.

All of this said, there is a section in the book in which Professor Elbow discusses process writing as a way of uncovering what one may not realize one has learned in a course--or in life for that matter. This is really a method of journal writing, and it is effective, I believe, in helping students get to the bottoms to their own understandings of how they understand what they learned in any setting. I think William Zinsser argued that case much more cogently in his book Writing to Learn.… (mer)

Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers, which I first encountered in 1974, changed the way I thought about writing and freed me from one of my chief impediments: the idea that I had to work out in my head, or in an outline, what I wanted to say before I wrote anything down. By introducing the concept of freewriting, Elbow made it possible to start anywhere, and trust that the process of writing without a teacher, and without editing, would be sufficient to get core ideas down, which later editing and revising could polish into something that might never have come to be, using the method drilled into me in high school and college.… (mer)