Notes on Writing without Teachers by Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow’s book discusses the value of writing groups in which writing is evaluated without the expectations of the traditional teacher-student-classroom relationship. In his introduction, he provides a brief personal memoir on his background as both a student and teacher of writing, a background in which inadvertently developed his theory of the “believing game” where one writes without fear of correction, rejection, or any other type of limiting instruction. The concept–freewriting–is designed to get sentences on the page–wordy and clean, ambiguous and clear. From there, one could edit, sloshing through the sludge of poorly written material, finding the fertility of the well written.

He contrasts the “believing game” with the “doubt game,” which is the more traditional way of looking at writing specifically and education generally. The “believing game” is more prescriptive and can hinder the bloom of thought because it creates hesitation in the writer who is trying to work along the expectations of a professor who may not fully understand the message the writer is trying to present, a problem added to by the fact that the writer themself may not know. And sometimes, the only way to arrive at knowing is to work through the unknowing.

Elbow relies on two metaphors with the “believing game,” growing and cooking. Growing is the work the writer does alone; cooking is that which is done with the group. The growing borrows from the gardening metaphor because the freewriting is a type of planting and the scaffolding upon the good–or at least helpful–writing leads to the growth. The cooking concept refers to the group dynamic where ideas simmer through clear, honest feedback and a collaborative culture. When I say collaborative, I don’t mean that Elbow is saying the writers within the group co-author each other’s work but rather the writers within the group are committed to communicating clearly what they understand and what they thought while reading the text. It’s not a place to pick at grammar or quibble over conceptual meaning, both of which have their place in the “doubting game,” which Elbow repeatedly explains also has value but not at the same time and in the same way as the “believing game.”

The book ends with an appendix containing series of essays in which Elbow seems to anticipate and troubleshoot some of the objections that other academics might have about his ideas. Elbow understands that language has meaning but that meaning exists because of the gestalt we bring to it, and because of that, we should plug into that gestalt when writing (especially in the early stages) so that we can add to the knowledge zeitgeist of which we all are part of.