Everyone Can Write: Essays toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing

The Wabash Center

Author: Elbow, Peter
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford, NY
ISBN: 9780195104165
Table of Contents: Part I - Premises and Foundations
ch. 1 Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write
ch. 2 A Map of Writing in Terms of Audience and Response
ch. 3 The Uses of Binary Thinking
Fragments: The Believing Game - A Challenge After Twenty-Five Years

Part II - The Generative Dimension
ch. 4 Freewriting and the Problem of Wheat and Tares
ch. 5 Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience
ch. 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
ch. 7 The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and Writing
ch. 8 Voice in Literature
ch. 9 Silence: A Collage
ch. 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
ch. 11 Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues
ch. 12 In Defense of Private Writing: Consequences for Theory and Research
ch. 13 The War Between Reading and Writing - and How to End It
ch. 14 Your Cheatin' Art: A Collage
Fragments: Can Personal Expressive Writing Do the Work of Academic Writing?

Part V - Teaching
ch. 15 Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond "Mistakes," "Bad English," and "Wrong Language"
ch. 16 High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing
ch. 17 Breathing Life into the Text
ch. 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
ch. 19 Getting Along With Grades - and Getting Along With Them Too
ch. 20 Starting the Portfolio Experiment at SUNY Stony Brook
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 Linking
ch. 21 Writing Assessment in the Twenty-First Century: A Utopian View

Published Works

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. (From the Publisher)

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