Writing without Teachers (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THE most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do freewriting exercises regularly..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Humpty Dumpty

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers seems to have come into being at the same time as '70s encounter groups, that's because it did. First published in 1976, Writing Without Teachers advocates improving your writing via freewriting and the "teacherless writing class." Freewriting, according to Elbow, is a terrific way to get things onto the page that you never knew you had in you: "Never stop ... to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing." Only after you have finished writing should you contemplate editing. And though much of what you produce when freewriting will be real garbage, Elbow promises that the best parts will be far better than anything you could have written otherwise. "You will use up more paper," he warns, "but chew up fewer pencils."

The teacherless writing class is Elbow's other key to unlocking the writer within. Elbow prefers these groups to those with teachers, because a teacher, he says, "usually isn't in a position where he can be genuinely affected by your words." In a teacherless group, the other participants "give you better evidence of what is unclear in your writing." Elbow insists that members of a writing group disregard conventional theories of "good" and "bad" writing, urging instead that they react to one another's work in a more subjective manner. The ultimate goal, he says, is for the group process to help each writer improve his or her ability to decide "which parts of [his or her] own writing to keep and which to throw away." --Jane Steinberg

Review

Praise for the previous edition:
"A wise and witty analysis of the process of self-confrontation and growth through writing."--Harvard Educational Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 2 edition (June 25, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195120167
• ISBN-13: 978-0195120165
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #242,535 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't edit while you write! Write first, edit later.
, October 20, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Writing Without Teachers (Paperback)

Since I first read Writing without Teachers in 1985, I've written - or helped write - proposals that have won 8-figure engineering contracts. (Yes, that's $10M+.) Prior to reading this book, I'd never written a winning proposal. I owe Peter Elbow a lot!

His most useful prescription is not even the core of the book, but it literally taught me how to write. It's this: if you have to write something you understand, you have only four hours, and you don't know where to begin, do the following.

Hour one: write for an hour without stopping, editing, organizing, or trying to do well; stop at the end of the hour and identify your strongest points.

Hour two: start with those points, write just as you did in the first hour, and then extract your best points.

Hour three: same routine again.

Hour four: now that you know what you're talking about, capture your best points, organize, and write a structured final draft. Sounds simple, but it's the best advice for breaking through writer's block I've ever heard.

Peter Elbow's prose style is simple and straightforward. He's not quite as much fun to read as Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) or William Goldman (Adventures in the Screen Trade) or Lawrence Block (too many to mention), but his advice was so well-timed that I owe him - big-time.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Elbow's best, February 5, 2006

By	T. A. Smedes (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book consists basically of three parts. In the first part, Elbow describes his 'freewriting'-approach to writing: growing & cooking. In the second part, Elbow writes about his idea of the 'teacherless writing class'. The third part is Elbow's appendix-essay wherein Elbow analyses the intellectual approaches to criticism (or as he calls it the relation between 'the doubting game' and 'the believing game').

As Elbow explains in the long introduction to the second edition, this book is Elbow's personal statement on writing. It was written in part out of dissatisfaction with many approaches to writing at universities, partly out of Elbow's own existential struggles with writing (as well as with other aspects of his personal life). In a sense, this book presents Elbow's anti-establishment ideas on writing and learning.

As a writing book, this is not Elbow's best. Many times, Elbow writing in this book remains abstract and is rather wordy. Consider this passage: "Simple reversal: starting to write X and seeing, thorugh development of X, that Y is right. I couldn't get there directly. I remembered I had even considered Y first, but I hadn't believed it. I had to go through X first before I could really understand Y." (36) There are more passages like this one.

I definitely recommend Elbow's "Writing with Power", since that is a brilliant book. I read that book first and then turned to this one, since I hoped to find more details on the growing & cooking process. However, "Writing with Power" is great for its conciseness and because of the many lively examples that he uses there - unlike this book. "Writing without Teachers" could have been so much better... a pity, since I am a fan of Elbow's approach.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars freewriting + public review, September 11, 2002

By	John C. Dunbar (Sugar Land, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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In addition to free-writing, and the overall strategy of how to write a theme with limited time (commented by earlier reviewers), the author also shows the importance of getting feedback on your writing. He encourages you to organize groups of like-minded authors to review each other's writing. There is a very specific protocol for this... and its easy to screw up, so you really need to get the book to find out the details.

Without such feedback you will not be able to understand what the reader is thinking as he reads your work. Elbow is not describing how to get "feedback" but how to understand the effect your writing has on the reader. In these meetings each individual describes what was going on in his head, what he remembers... not whether he liked your work. Thus, you see the effect.

All three of my Peter Elbow's books have been extremely helpful. My only complaint is that his writing is too wordy. However, his wordiness is pleasant to endure. This book is easily worth a 5 out of 5.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX