With Writing without Teachers (OUP 1975) and Writing with Power (OUP 1995) Peter Elbow revolutionized the teaching of writing. His process method--and its now commonplace free writing techniques--liberated generations of students and teachers from the emphasis on formal principles of grammar that had dominated composition pedagogy.
This new collection of essays brings together the best of Elbow's writing since the publication of Embracing Contraries in 1987. The volume includes sections on voice, the experience of writing, teaching, and evaluation. Implicit throughout is Elbow's commitment to humanizing the profession, and his continued emphasis on the importance of binary thinking and nonadversarial argument. The result is a compendium of a master teacher's thought on the relation between good pedagogy and good writing; it is sure to be of interest to all professional teachers of writing, and will be a valuable book for use in composition courses at all levels.
Author(s): Peter Elbow
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 412
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Premises and Foundations
1 Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write
2 A Map of Writing in Terms of Audience and Response
3 The Uses of Binary Thinking
Fragments: The Believing Game—A Challenge after Twenty-Five Years
Part II: The Generative Dimension
4 Freewriting and the Problem of Wheat and Tares
5 Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience
6 Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting
Fragments: Wrongness and Felt Sense
The Neglect and Rediscovery of Invention
Form and Content as Sources of Creation
Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice
7 The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and Writing
8 Voice in Literature
9 Silence: A Collage
10 What Is Voice in Writing?
Fragments: On the Concept of Voice
Audible Voice: How Much Do We Hear the Text?
Voice in Texts as It Relates to Teaching
Part IV: Discourses
11 Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues
12 In Defense of Private Writing: Consequences for Theory and Research
13 The War Between Reading and Writing— and How to End It
14 Your Cheatin' Art: A Collage
Fragments: Can Personal Expressive Writing Do the Work of Academic Writing?
Part V: Teaching
15 Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond "Mistakes," "Bad English," and "Wrong Language"
16 High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing
17 Breathing Life into the Text
18 Using the Collage for Collaborative Writing
Fragments: Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals
Separating Teaching from Certifying
What Kind of Leadership Is Best for Collaborative Learning?
Part VI: Evaluation and Grading
19 Getting Along Without Grades— and Getting Along With Them Too
20 Starting the Portfolio Experiment at SUNY Stony Brook Pat Belanoff, co-author
Fragments: Problems with Grading
The Conflict Between Reliability and Validity
How Portfolios Shake Up the Assessment Process and Thereby Lead too Minimal Holistic Scoring and Multiple Trait Scoring
Multiple Trait Scoring as an Alternative to Holistic Scoring
Tracking Leads to a Narrow Definition of Intelligence
The Benefits and Feasibility of Liking
21 Writing Assessment in the Twenty-First Century: A Utopian View
Published Works by Peter Elbow
