His instructors there weren’t impressed with his writing. One told him, “Mr. Elbow, you continue your steady but far from headlong rise upward.” But he wasn’t dissuaded.

Professor Elbow

“The free-writing principle is the principle of juice, of letting go, of garbage, of finding diamonds among the garbage: all the metaphors you can make about free writing,” he told Writing on the Edge.

As he was writing (or not writing), he jotted notes to himself.“If something happened that struck me, I would write a note — sometimes just on a little scrap of paper — and would slip these pieces of paper into a folder,” he said in the interview. “Especially if I got stuck, I would take another piece of paper and say, ‘You’re stuck on this damn paper, so write about why you got stuck.’”The idea was to just get his thoughts down.

“I made myself a rule: every time a paper was due, I had to have a draft of the same length as the paper done a week before,” he said in a 1992 interview with the academic journal Writing on the Edge. “So then I knew I had a week to play with it.”

“The free-writing principle is the principle of juice, of letting go, of garbage, of finding diamonds among the garbage,” he said.Credit...

Poking his finger in the eye of hidebound pedagogues, Professor Elbow contended that indoctrinating freshmen to think and write in an inflexible, formulaic style — with the teacher as the only audience member — inhibited creativity and confidence at a key moment in their intellectual development.

the influential composition professor Peter Elbow suggested reading a poem backwards as a way to “breathe life into a text” (Elbow 201).

Elbow, P. (1999). Options for responding to student writing. In R. Straub (Ed.), Asourcebook for responding to student writing (pp. 197-202). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.