Everyone Can Write

Peter Elbow is Professor of English and Director of the writing program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2001, he received the James R. Squire Award from the National Council of Teachers of English "for his transforming influence and lasting intellectual contribution to the English Profession."

This volume belongs in the library of everyone who teaches or studies composition theory.... This collection,...drawn from three decades of musings and reflections, demands the attention of anyone seriously interested in teaching writing.

• 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; The Uses of Binary Thinking ; 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 ; 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? ; Part IV: Discourses ; 11. Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues ; 12. In Defense of Private Writing ; 13. The War Between Reading and Writing - and How to End It ; 14. Your Cheatin' Art: A Collage ; 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 ; 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 ; 19. Getting Along Without Grades - and Getting Along With Them Too ; 20. Starting the Portfolio Experiment at SUNY Stony Brook Pat Belanoff, co-author ; 21. Writing an Assessment in the Twenty-First Century: A Utopian View