Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow is a Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also directed the Writing Program from 1996 until 2000. He writes about theory, practice, and pedagogy, and has authored several books and a number of papers. His practices in regard to editing and revising are now widely accepted and taught as the writing process. The invention technique freewriting is dubbed as a "student-centered movement".

In the introduction to the second edition of Writing Without Teachers, Elbow says that his interest in writing practices came from his own difficulty with writing. He attended Proctor Academy and Williams College from 1953 to 1957. While at Exeter College, Oxford University, on scholarship from Williams, he found himself unable to write the assigned essays. When he began his PhD in English at Harvard University, his writing difficulties persisted, causing him to leave in the first year of his studies. Elbow began teaching, first as an instructor at MIT from 1960–1963, and then as one of nine founding members of Franconia College from 1963-1965. It was at Franconia where Elbow discovered he could write more easily when writing for colleagues or students rather than as an assigned piece.

In 1965 he returned to graduate school, this time at Brandeis University. He had to get over beginning by trying to write "well" -- that is to write good sentences and work from an outline. He had to learn to write what he liked to call "garbage." He came to accept that he simply couldn't write right; he could only write wrong; and then try by revising to make it right. Elbow has said that the process of freewriting really came about during this time in his life. He would sit down with his typewriter and type out all his thoughts, making writing a sort of therapy. This helped him to write his graduate papers. When it came time to write a dissertation, he spent a year trying to write about metaphor -- not metaphor as linguistic decoration but metaphor as thinking. He realized that this would make the process interminable. He settled on Chaucer. He would eventually make his dissertation book-length and publish it in 1975 under the title Oppositions in Chaucer.

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