Peter Elbow and Donald Murray Writing Processes Essay

1130 Words5 Pages
Writing, according to Peter Elbow and Donald Murray, is a never ending process that can always be made better. Peter Elbow is considered by some writing teachers to have revolutionized the teaching of writing through the concept of "free writing". Donald Murray presents the stage of the revision process, showing its usefulness to all writers. Whether it be through revision or doing a free write to brainstorm whatever ideas come to mind, both Elbow and Murray use different strategies in order to enhance their writing; Elbow uses his own personal experiences of free writing that he has revolutionized in his essay, while Murray shows uses logic to show that his style of revision and editing based writing is the correct way to write. The easiest and most effective way to improve our writing according Peter Elbow is through what he calls "Free writing". Free writing simply means to write continuously for a set period of time, without having to worry about grammar, spelling or having to make any corrections. Unfortunately, Free writing is not always the best way to go about writing. Peter Elbow says in his essay, "That the best way to improve your writing is to do Free writing" (105). What Free writing essentially is just to help us clear our mind and put our thoughts onto a piece of paper. It is a good way to think and brainstorm what we are planning to write about, but it won't necessarily improve our writing skills. Peter Elbow's own essay about free writing would've been unable to be published had it not been edited. Elbow mentions many things that editing takes out of papers. For example, unacceptable thoughts and feelings, your own voice and "bad writing" (106). Usually, in writing a paper there really isn't a need for it, except for maybe the voice on occasion. According to Peter Elbow, these are the main problems that are associated with editing, but he goes
Open Document