Peter Elbow, an English professor whose struggles with writer’s block led him to create a new way of teaching freshman composition that emphasized free-writing exercises, personal reflection and peer feedback over rigid academic conventions that often stifled students, died on Feb. 6 in Seattle. He was 89.
His wife, Cami Pelz Elbow, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a perforated intestine.
Professor Elbow, who taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, emerged in 1973 as a towering, if somewhat divisive, figure in college English departments with the publication of his book “Writing Without Teachers.”
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.
Instead, he proposed a more reflective and touchy-feely process, in which students engaged in free-writing exercises without worrying about grammar or anything else. The goal was to generate ideas and then solicit feedback from peers before shaping those ingredients — Professor Elbow was fond of cooking metaphors — into a wholesome meal.
“Writing is a process that is two-sided,” he told The New York Times in 1983. “On the one hand, a writer has to be creative and loose and generate a lot of words. On the other hand, he has to be hard-nosed and make sure that what he says makes sense. It helps to separate these two requirements.”
Professor Elbow came to his conclusions out of necessity.
“What got me interested in writing,” he often said, “was being unable to write.”
While he originally intended to become a professor of literature, he suffered a debilitating case of writer’s block almost as soon as he arrived at Harvard in 1959 to pursue his doctorate on Chaucer. Late nights at his typewriter turned into blurry mornings, with little to show on paper.
“I had a terrible time getting my first semester papers written at all, and they were graded unsatisfactory,” he wrote in “Everyone Can Write” (2000). “I could have stayed if I’d done well the next semester, but after only a few weeks I could see things were getting worse rather than better. I quit before being kicked out.”
After landing odd jobs as a census taker and a timer for students practicing for their college board exams, he taught literature and interdisciplinary studies at M.I.T. and then at Franconia College, an experimental liberal arts school in New Hampshire that folded in 1978.
The jobs were low-paying, at the instructor level, but he was intellectually inspired by connecting students to literature and decided to resume his doctoral studies, enrolling at Brandeis University. This time, he approached writing as a distinct process that emphasized creativity, reflection and revision.
“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.”
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.
“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.
Professor Elbow finished his dissertation on Chaucer and took up a series of teaching positions, but he didn’t focus on writing full time until around 1981, the year he published “Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process,” which codified his ideas into textbook form.
As he spoke at conferences and published academic papers about his ideas, he found a sympathetic audience — the scores of college instructors struggling to teach freshman composition and get their students excited about writing. His book sales soared, and today his methods are used in colleges across the country.
“It would be very hard to overstate Peter’s influence on the field,” Joseph Harris, the author of “A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966,” said in an interview. “He was instrumental in shifting the attention of teachers to helping students generate new prose ideas — to go from nothing to something on the page.”
Peter Henry Elbow was born on April 14, 1935, in Manhattan, and grew up in Fairlawn, N.J., and Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. His father, C. William Elbow Jr., owned a men’s clothing store. His mother, Helen Hillyer Platt, was an artist.
He attended Proctor Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, where he formed a close relationship with a teacher named Bob Fisher.
“We’d read Dostoyevsky,” Professor Elbow recalled in the Writing on the Edge interview. “He would ask us to write about deep things. I also remember writing a fairy tale. He loved ideas and he took us seriously, inviting us to love ideas and to take deep dives into profundity.”
Peter went to Williams College because Mr. Fisher did.
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.
“I was eager to do well and I worked hard at it — and by the end of my first year had begun to do so,” he wrote in “Everyone Can Write.” “Indeed, I gradually found myself wanting to enter their world and be like them — a college professor, not just a teacher. I wanted to be a learned, ironic, tweedy, pipe-smoking professor of literature.”
He graduated in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, and then earned a master’s at Oxford.
Professor Elbow taught at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., Wesleyan University and Stony Brook University before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1987. He retired in 2000, but continued writing about writing.
His first marriage ended in divorce. He married Cami Campbell Pelz in 1972, and they moved to the Seattle area in 2014.
In addition to his wife, Professor Elbow is survived by their children, Abigail Lockwood Elbow and Benjamin Child Elbow, and two granddaughters.
Professor Elbow wore turtleneck sweaters and sport coats, just like the professors he once idolized. At first, his students were a little confused by what he asked them to do.
“The first time I was given a free-writing exercise, I didn’t know what to do with it,” one of his students told The Times in 1983. “There was a feeling that this can’t go on too long. But after the first few times, the exercise began to make sense and writing became a little bit easier.”
The post Peter Elbow, Professor Who Transformed Freshman Comp, Dies at 89 appeared first on New York Times.
