Ah, Peter Elbow, a man whose ideas I had to read much of in order to complete my FYC. After reading through them, I find myself disliking most of them, except two. I do find his use of free writing to be somewhat beneficial. Elbow advocates using free writing in classes as markers of a students ability while also allowing the writer to push off the yoke of audience until a later time. Free writing, as it worked in my class, allowed the students to start writing with a familiar topic, themselves, before diving into topics about which they could not care less. I’m not going to agree with Elbow and say it makes them better writers, but I will say it allows for them to start writing easier. It is this ease that makes the free writing activity useful, as a tool.
The other idea I find myself agreeing with is the ignoring of audience while writing the paper. I wholeheartedly believe that students should not write for somebody or some group but for themselves. Their peers then can assist the writer in finding mistakes and flaws in logic within their sentence structure and argument, but the paper, the ideas, are written from the individual without any sort of influence from an external audience. Students writing for themselves, to create knowledge about their own beliefs, benefits both the students’ process of self-discovery and their writing.