Elbow, Peter. "Exploring My Writing." Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching.

"Much teaching behavior really stems from an unwarranted fear of things falling apart. When I started to act on my new feelings and to refrain from unsolicited telling and asking, I discovered that the fear lay behind much of my previous teaching. I began to realize I'd always been 'running' or 'structuring' a class with the underlying feeling that if I ever stopped, some unspecifiable chaos or confusion would ensue" (71-72). I think this might be one of the differentations between composition and creative writing. In composition, we offer processes to stimulate critical thinking, ideas to organize and focus, stress the need for a thesis statement around which the work must center. In creative writing, there is much more room to flounder, and the instructors are comfortable with allowing their students to flounder and even fail. However, both compositionists and creative writers believe in revision, in that their first draft won't be the perfect one and that it's OK. For creative writers, perhaps there's even more revision, because we don't always have a clear "thesis" or "theme" in mind as we start to write.

"An actual audience is crucial for writing. English teachers know it helps for the student to imagine an audience. But this is nothing compared to the benefit of actually having one. The best thing about my course is the fact that each student writes something weekly he knows the rest of the class will read and, for the most part, comment on" (73).

"For learning, empirical feedback is a good thing and normative evaluation is a bad thing. Empirical feedback, in the case of writing, means learning what the words did to the reader. Normative evaluation means having the words judgmentally ranked according to some abstract standard" (75). This seems to support workshopping.