Elbow: Phenomenology of Freewriting (sis)
Peter Elbow: Everyone Can Write
Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory
of Writing and Teaching Writing (2000)
(Ebrary, Jyväskylän yliopiston kirjaston e-tietokannassa)
PHENOMENOLOGY OF FREEWRITING
113 - 135
In this chapter, then, let me try to tell why freewriting is not just a handydandy
tool but something at the center of what I do as a writer and a teacher.
I started out writing a considerably different chapter, more impersonal and
analytic. It got soggy and I gradually sensed I should focus on how I use and
experience freewriting
Freewriting Without Knowing It:
Desperation Journal Writing
Freewriting as Incoherent
Freewriting for Unfocused Exploring
Freewriting as Sociable
The Difference Between Private and
Public Freewriting
Using Freewriting to Write Responses
or Feedback
Freewriting about Freewriting
Process Writing When I'm Stuck:
Articulating Resistance
Heightened Intensity
A Kind of Goodness in Writing
Relinquishing Control—Not Striving
for Mastery
Dwelling In and Popping Out
A Different Relationship to Writing
In conclusion then, freewriting has gradually given me a profoundly different
experience of and relationship to writing. Where writing used to be the exercise
of greater than usual care and control (especially in comparison to speaking),
freewriting has led me to experience writing in addition as an arena of
less than usual care and control: writing as an arena for putting down words
and thoughts in a deeply unbuttoned way. And when I make progress toward
something "higher" in writing—toward clarity of thinking or effectiveness of
language or toward meta-awareness—I experience this progress as rooted in
freewriting, the "lowest" of writing activities.