Peter Elbow (April 14, 1935–February 6, 2025) was a professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also directed the Writing Program from 1996 until 2000.
As a scholar whose published work raised both academic and popular awareness of scholarship within the field of Rhetoric and Composition, Elbow’s research includes theory, practice, and pedagogy.
While at Exeter College, Oxford University, on scholarship from Williams, he found himself unable to write the assigned essays.
[2] 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.
While sitting in his office one day in 1970, a representative from Oxford University Press came to show him some books that he might like to use in his classes.
The goal is to create language that is more natural and lively, all the while making the writing process easier and more comfortable [7] Feedback techniques are also among Elbow's practices.
Criterion-based feedback judges the writing against standard criteria, such as content, usage, organization, and general effectiveness.
[9] Elbow claims that reader-based feedback lets the writer see what thoughts and feelings occur in a reader's mind as he or she is reading the text.
These are metaphors that reflect Elbow's interest in letting one's ideas develop and change throughout the writing process.
Elbow suggests that writers spend sufficient time writing as well as stopping completely and reflecting on what the larger picture is meant to present.
They discuss it with the goal of getting the writer to see not necessarily what is wrong or right with the piece, but instead what effect the writing has on the readers in the group, as opposed to one teacher's opinion.
[12] Elbow feels doubting and believing are two methods needed in order to examine and accept an idea as true.
The appendix to Writing Without Teachers has a section called "The Doubting and Believing Game: An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise".
Elbow started out simply trying to justify his "no arguing" rule for teacher-less classes, but it developed into what really is the central theoretical foundation underlying all of his work.
This book takes writers through the whole writing process from generating ideas (where freewriting once more makes an appearance) to revising and editing both alone and with others.
[13] In the 1980s and 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.
[14][15] Bartholomae posits that Elbow "comes down on the side of credulity as the governing idea in the undergraduate writing course," whereas he, himself, expresses more skepticism.
Another major aspect of the debate comes from the idea of writing without teachers, a concept that Bartholomae states doesn't exist.
Elbow cites diaries, letters, stories, poems, and so forth as ways that students write for themselves with no teachers involved.
The debate has, over the years, helped to shape the study and teaching of composition,[17][18] especially in regard to how much power is granted to the writer.