[This is a post about writing. Because it’s an homage to Pater Elbow (1935-2025), it’s also a post about teaching writing, which I did for several years at several schools in the 1980s and ’90s. I also did some writing for publication, mostly about theater, many of which pieces have ended up revived here on Rick On Theater.
I’ve also posted a number of articles on writing on ROT: ”On Reviewing” (22 March 2009), “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward” (4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009) “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “‘Draft: The Essay, An Exercise In Doubt’” by Phillip Lopate (2 November 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), “Words on Words” (1 February 2014), “Words and Pictures?” (25 July 2014), “How to Write a Play” by Kirk Woodward (18 February 2016), “More Words on Words” (8 June 2016), “On Criticism” (27 October 2021), and “How I Write” (25 February 2022).
[Peter Elbow, who died in Seattle on February 6 at 89, taught English teachers, was a professor of English composition and literature and a scholar of the theory, practice, and pedagogy of writing. (Elbow’s obituary wasn’t published in the New York Times until 3 March, after being posted on the paper’s website on 27 February.)]
On 28 July 2015, I posted a tribute to writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher of writing William Zinsser (1922-2015), who, I said on this blog, “had a profound influence on me and my life” (William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In). At the time I encountered Zinsser—through his wonderful book On Writing Well (we never met in person)—I was trying to figure out how to write for my new doctoral program in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.
I started in the department in the fall of 1983 and a required class was Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance, a course taught then by Kate Davy (retired provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn). On Writing Well (1976) was a text for the course, which, while essentially covering just what the title indicates, was also partly a writing class for DPS grad students.
One of the main emphases at DPS when I was there was a clear, readable writing style. All the faculty specifically stressed it in their classes—my instructors Michael Kirby (1931-97), Brooks McNamara (1937-2009), and Richard Schechner (b. 1934) in particular. These men all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review, one of the leading academic journals in theater and performance studies. All our written work was expected to be of publishable quality, whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal.
The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose. As the same time, I was offered a preceptorship in the undergrad Expository Writing Program. (‘Preceptor’ was what the EWP called its teaching assistants at that time.) Performance Studies grad students, I later learned, were considered a prime pool for prospective EWP preceptors because of the department’s emphasis on writing.
So, just when I was starting a writing-intense grad program myself, I also began teaching writing to undergrads. NYU required all new undergraduates to take a two-semester Writing Workshop; we preceptors each taught two sections of the twice-weekly course. Thus, undertaking the responsibility to guide and train students in a field in which I never before considered myself even a practitioner, much less an expert, made me examine and question my own writing even more critically.
I didn’t become mindful of my writing until I started to work on the thesis for my 1977 Master of Fine Arts degree in acting at Rutgers University’s School of Creative and Performing Arts (the predecessor to the Mason Gross School of the Arts). The only writing I did between graduating from college in 1969 and writing the thesis was in the army—various kinds of reports—whose literary demands were not great. My MFA courses demanded very little writing of any consequence as all but one were performance classes, not academic.
So, at the same time that writing was still an evolving process for me, I had to take a course in New York University’s School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions (SEHNAP) called Practicum: Teaching Expository Writing. The ‘practicum,’ a course designed for the preparation of teachers in a particular field that involves the practical application of theory, was taught by Gordon Pradl (1943-2020), a longtime professor of English education at NYU’s ed school who believed that the teaching of writing mattered.
The Writing Practicum was a required class for all preceptors who were teaching the Writing Workshop. That’s where I first read Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (Oxford University Press, 1973). It introduced me to a writing technique that has been a significant help to me in my development as a writer. Let me now pay Elbow the proper thanks for that invaluable service.
The written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work; the performance itself was. The written document wasn’t intended to stand alone without it. I had to write about the performance of my “thesis role” so that it would both document it and explain the process by which I arrived at it, and I had to do it not for myself, but for a committee of faculty members who would cross-question me on what I said.
I was therefore constrained to write a readable account, if not by departmental or scholarly pressure, then by my own desire to do the best damn thesis the department had seen. Furthermore, the thesis would be put in the university library for posterity. I would be “on record” for anyone to read.
(The thesis is, indeed, in the Archibald S. Alexander Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey: “Colonel Johann Rall: The Creation of an Historical Portrait,” call number PN.K89 1978. I’ve also published an edited version of the paper on Rick On Theater: “Johann Rall: A Historical Portrait,” 10 and 15 December 2009.
(Colonel Rall (1721-26 – 1776)] was the commander of the Hessian mercenaries who defended Trenton for the British against the American in the Battle of Trenton in the Revolutionary War, the assault across the Delaware River on the morning after Christmas 1776. He was a major featured character in Devil Take the Hindmost by William Mastrosimone, whose MFA playwriting thesis it was.
(The performances were staged on 12-14 and 17-21 November 1976 at the Levin Theater at Douglass College, Rutgers University, East Brunswick, New Jersey, and on 11 February 1977 at the American College Theatre Festival IX, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.)
The problem was, I didn’t have any idea how to go about doing this. I didn’t know how to write the way I thought I wanted to. I had to learn for myself how to do it.
The fact is, I don’t remember ever having been taught anything about writing when I was in school. We learned grammar in elementary and middle school in those days, of course, but composition courses weren’t part of the curriculum. In high school and college lit classes we studied writers, but not writing. If someone did, in fact, teach me to write, I certainly didn’t learn very well, so I set about (re)learning.
At the very beginning, I was terribly blocked. I didn’t know how to start. I lived in New York City and commuted to New Brunswick by car, and I brought my full-sized electric typewriter—plus paper and whatever else I needed—with me. Whenever I had an hour or more, or when I could cut a class, I set myself up somewhere . . . and basically sat and stared at a blank piece of cheap yellow paper I used for typing drafts.
This went on for days—probably a couple of weeks at least. I was getting scared. It wasn’t as if the paper was long. Acting theses were usually 15 to 20 pages. (Mine ended up at 44 pages, which was very long—but I was very detailed, and I had two separate mountings of the show: the regular university theater production in East Brunswick and then, three months later, the American College Theatre Festival regional competition in Ithaca, 220 miles to the northwest.)
I finally convinced myself that I had to get started somehow, and I decided I would just begin. I would just start putting words on paper (no word processors yet) as swiftly as I could and worry later about whether they made sense and were grammatical. I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was “freewriting” about the role and my performance, a strategy I later learned is called “focused freewriting.” Very soon, words and thoughts all just began to pour out.
Freewriting, of which focused freewriting is an application, is a prewriting exercise advocated by Peter Elbow at the very beginning of Writing Without Teachers. Prewriting is a step in the writing process (the procedure for putting ideas and words on paper: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, proofreading) that covers anything a writer does before putting words in sentences on paper or screen. Prewriting techniques help me if I have trouble getting started, if I find that I’ve run out of ideas in the middle of writing, or if I feel that my ideas are not worthy of a reader’s attention.
(There are other prewriting techniques aside from freewriting and focused freewriting—brainstorming and subject-mapping, for example—but freewriting is writing in sentences and even paragraphs, while brainstorming results in lists of words and phrases and subject-mapping uses diagrams and lines.)
In Elbow’s words,
The idea [of freewriting] is simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty). Don’t stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing. If you can’t think of a word or a spelling, just use a squiggle or else write “I can’t think what to say, I can’t think what to say” as many times as you want; or repeat the last word you wrote over and over again; or anything else. The only requirement is that you never stop.
Focused freewriting, which isn’t specifically an Elbow technique, is a tactic that I still use today. Just as Elbow prescribes with freewriting, I write for at least ten minutes on whatever comes to mind about one topic without pausing. (The “without pausing” can be a problem for me because I’m a compulsive ruminator, but I have no trouble with the ten-minute requirement—I suffer from literary logorrhea.) I’m not concerned about grammar, punctuation, or spelling, so I try not to change anything I’ve written. (That’s hard for me because I’m an inveterate self editor.)
Elbow explains the benefits of freewriting in his book, but for me, its chief benefit is, as it was at that time almost 50 years ago when I stumbled on it and it broke the logjam I feared would scuttle my MFA. I was surprised and mighty gratified when what I come up with serendipitously, I discovered eight years later was an actual technique used by writing teachers and written up in books.
Because of scheduling, I didn’t take Pradl’s Practicum until the start of my second year at NYU. By then, I’d already been teaching in the EWP for a year, and, what’s more, I’d had my first piece of writing published in TDR. (The essay came out in the winter issue of 1984 [vol. 28, no, 4 – T104], but I posted a version of it on ROT as “The Group Theatre's Johnny Johnson” [18 November 2019].)
Writing Without Teachers was the first text assigned in the class, and as privately thrilled as I was to see “my” technique emphasized so prominently by Peter Elbow, I was a little taken aback that a book about learning to write without a teacher was being spotlighted in a class for teachers of writing!
Not that I felt that there was anything amiss about people teaching themselves to write. After all, it turned out that I had done so, myself. But I was glad to have the backing of pros like Gordon Pradl, William Zinsser, and Peter Elbow to help me pass on what I’d learned—and was still learning—to others.
[As I said above, I taught composition at NYU in 1983-85. I also taught it at a couple of other colleges and even ninth-grade English once (1987-88). I learned a few things about the state of education in the United States as it was in the post-’60s decades, especially as applied to the teaching of writing—which I’ve always felt is really the teaching of thinking—after what was a more touchy-feely period of pedagogy.
[Let me preface my remarks by acknowledging that I’m an honest-to-goodness Baby Boomer—the first wave, no less, born a little over a year after World War II ended. I grew up in the Eisenhower ’50s and spent almost my entire teen years in the first half of the ’60s. We still learned grammar, syntax, the parts of speech, and spelling and how to parse a sentence and diagram it.
[I explained above how I ended up at the head of a college writing class. (Why I took the preceptorship, that I can’t explain. I was tendered a scholarship when I was accepted into the Performance Studies program, but when I was offered the preceptorship, I took that over the scholarship. I suppose I was flattered, considering my lack of experience as a writer, much less as a teacher of writing.)
[Of course, I didn’t have any time to bone up, much less learn how to teach writing. We had a handbook, a syllabus, and a quick orientation, and boom, we were in it! It should have been the real-life embodiment of the Actor’s Nightmare, where an actor finds himself on stage in a play he doesn’t know, playing a character whose lines and movements he doesn’t know, with other actors he doesn’t know. But, it wasn’t.
[I found out a few discouraging things, however. The first was that the reason New York University had a required composition class for all undergraduates was apparently because the graduates of America’s high schools who were matriculating didn’t know how to write. Certainly not at an acceptable college level.
[I’d later discover that NYU wasn’t by any means the only school requiring an essentially remedial writing course; they almost all did. My undergraduate college back in the late ’60s didn’t have such a class (though it might have been better off if it had).
[My second revelation was that none of the students knew grammar. Clearly, learning English grammar had been deemed old-fashioned in the decade between my high school graduation and the years my undergrads finished their secondary education. (I gather that it was reinstated to some extent in the following years, but I’m not certain.)
[I wasn’t so much disturbed because my writing students didn’t know the grammatical conventions I’d had to learn. I discovered, though, that I couldn’t discuss with the tyro writers what the problems they were having communicating in writing were without using the grammatical terms that were the jargon of writers and writing. I had to start teaching grammar (sort of surreptitiously) so my students and I would have a common language when we talked about their writing.
[I also noticed something else relative to my 20-something students, something that I found somewhat disquieting. There was a marked difference in the level of responding to the readings I assigned for their writing exercises. The practice was to read a piece that I thought was provocative for both its content and its presentation, that is, the writing. Then we’d discuss it in class, again both the ideas and the writing. Then I’d give them an essay assignment in response to the reading—usually very open-ended.
[It was in the classroom discussion where I began to notice this difference. Some students looked at the readings very directly, like a book report. What the writer had said, where they agreed or disagreed, very conventional reactions. This carried over into their writing as well.
[Other students went off on tangents, saw implications beyond the specific subject matter in the reading. These students also had more questions. Their imaginations were piqued. A third group was even more rigid than the first, reluctant to offer much of anything other than what the writers had said. They offered very little, even anything at all, of themselves in their responses, as if they had no opinions at all.
[As I got to know the students a little, more about their backgrounds, especially their secondary schooling, I found a troubling trend. That second group, the ones who were freest with their own ideas and thoughts were generally from private high schools or prep schools. The first group, the students who had responses, but they were, as I characterized them, “conventional.” Nothing that would surprise me. They were mostly graduates of public schools.
[The most limited responders, the ones who seemed to have nothing to offer aside from repeating what they understood the writer to have said, they turned out to be largely products of parochial schools.
[After I’d had a couple of individual conferences with the students, I came to this general conclusion: the level at which they participated in the class discussions, and then approached their written responses, had little to do with the quality of their previous education. It was the consequence of the way they were taught to consider their own ideas.
[The more responsive and expansive students had learned, either in their schools, or in their homes, or on their own, that their ideas and thoughts were valid, were worthy of voicing and considering. The most closed off students had been constrained to stay within narrow boundaries and had come to think that they didn’t have a right to have ideas outside those parameters—or, if they did, not to voice them.
[The middle group had seen that they had a little leeway to display ideas and thoughts not derived from their authorities, that is, their teachers and elders, but only so far and no farther. It wasn’t that some students had ideas and others didn’t, it was that some were encouraged to voice their ideas and thoughts and others had been overtly or tacitly restricted. It was now my job to unjam the works and let the students know that their responses were valid. They were valid because they had them.
[I was happy to see that after I began to stress this notion, that their ideas were worthy of being stated and that they weren’t going to be judged on what they think, but on how well, how clearly, they expressed those ideas in writing, some of the more reluctant student writers started breaking out of their cocoons. One young man—who actually had come from a church school—came to my desk in the Expository Writing office to thank me for letting him know his thoughts were worth expressing. He’d been censoring himself unwittingly. Made my week!
[A final comment on this observation: two student groups didn’t fit into this scenario. One were older students, including the odd grad student. Because NYU’s policy was that all students entering the university who hadn’t had a college-level composition class had to take the Writing Workshop, there were some upperclassmen and -women enrolled. Occasionally a grad student would be required to take the course if she or he was deemed deficient in writing skills.
[The other exception to my analysis were foreign students. Most of them were also older, but even when they weren’t, despite whatever they lacked in language fluency, their ratiocination was usually superior. My experience in Europe leads me to put the credit for this difference on the schools. The German, French, or British equivalent of a high school junior or senior is already working at a college level, especially if they’re at a lycée or gymnasium.
[I saw this even in an American high school. I had a Yugoslavian student, a recent immigrant with his family, who was assigned to my Level 2 ninth-grade English class, and even though he was just learning English, he was so far above the level of his classmates, that I recommended he be transferred to a Level 3 class. He came to thank me for taking this step in his behalf, and later his new teacher sought me out to tell me he was absolutely flourishing at Level 3.
[In the Writing Workshop at NYU, the best student I had in two years was a French woman. She may have been a little older, too, but aside from the occasional Gallic excess of her prose, her ideas and reasoning were always interesting and several steps beyond anything anyone else in the class had.]
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