Elbow, Peter. "The Process of Writing -- Cooking." Writing Without Teachers. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.

"Growing is the overall larger process, the evolution of whole organisms. Cooking is the smaller process: bubbling, percolating, fermenting, chemical interaction, atomic fusion. Cooking drives the engine that makes growing happen. It's because of cooking that a piece of writing can start out X and end up Y, that a writer can start out after supper seeing, feeling, and knowing things he hadn't thought of before" (48).

When a student approaches a paper with a ready-made thesis, the process of "cooking" isn't allowed to occur. This is especially important to realize when students are writing argumentative and persuasive papers. If the students aren't allowed time to consider both the X and the Y, they aren't allowed to change their positions or to think why they believe X. IF writing is a process, then the writers indeed need to cook -- to be given an opportunity to consider their positions, and other's positions, and why we think so differently about so many issues.

"Cooking is the interaction of contrasting or conflicting material ... cooking consists of the process of one piece of material (or one process) being transformed by interacting with another: one piece of material being seen through the lens of another, being dragged through the guts of another, being reoriented or reorganized in terms of the other, being mapped into the other."

This can also be seen as a writer's opportunity to view other pieces of literature, and to allow that literature to influence his or her own writing. I know that as I write fiction, I read several books -- I've read more than 40 works as I construct my own novel, and oftentimes the points they bring up, or styles they employ, can affect my own writings. I'm forced to consider my message (or theme) from different perspectives of other writers, and how they expressed or interpreted it in their own writing. This can also be considered a collaboration, albeit between texts instead of people.

Elbow reexamines the need for collaboration in writing in this chapter: "If you are stuck writing or trying to figure something out, there is nothing better than finding one person, or more, to talk to. If they don't agree or have trouble understanding, so much the better -- so long as their minds are not closed" (49). Workshopping your writing -- getting feedback, finding out what is working in your work and what isn't clear yet -- is essential. Again, writing is not an isolated event; you have an audience and you have to cater to it, understand how your message works on an intended reader before you know if it is effective.