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9 unusual facts about Peter Elbow


David Bartholomae

Most notably, Bartholomae dueled Peter Elbow in a public debate regarding the role of the student writer in university.

Draft document

More recently, Peter Elbow, in his book Writing Without Teachers, presents a very different view of the drafting stage in the writing process.

Free writing

blast past blocks into uninhibited flow, the concept outlined by writing teachers such as Louise Dunlap, Peter Elbow, and Natalie Goldberg.

Peter Elbow advanced freewriting in his book Writing Without Teachers (1975), and it has been popularized by Julia Cameron through her book The Artist's Way (1992).

Jim W. Corder

As a result of his writing style, Corder is often associated with scholars like Peter Elbow and other so-called “expressivists,” who were largely dismissed by many scholars in the discipline during the social turn of the late 1980s, as rhetoric and composition professionals began exploring critical theory and cultural studies and their connections to rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy.

Peter Elbow

Elbow cites diaries, letters, stories, poems, and so forth as ways that students write for themselves with no teachers involved.

In the 1990s, Peter Elbow engaged in a public debate with David Bartholomae regarding the role of the writer, as well as that of an academic in undergraduate writing.

Theories of rhetoric and composition pedagogy

Peter Elbow reflects moderate expressivist ideals in his claim that audience should be ignored during the early stages of the writing process, in order to avoid the hindrance of audience expectation and facilitate writer-based rather than reader-based text.

Writing process

Prominent figures in the field include John Dixon, Ken Macrorie, Lou Kelly, Donald C. Stewart and Peter Elbow.



see also