Throughout high school and college, writing was difficult for me—a condition shared by many, I’m sure. I don’t know if I was taught it (an AP test exempted me from College Composition) or if I devised it myself, but I followed a two-step writing process: planning/outlining and writing. A fear of not presenting my ideas logically grounded me in this process. I would plan meticulously, doing, I thought, all my “thinking” in the outlining/planning phase. For example, if I had to write a ten page research essay, I would craft a detailed five page (at least) outline that included sources and quotes and how I would incorporate these into my argument.

However, even with such scrupulous planning, I would encounter obstacles as I “fleshed out” my outline in words, sentences, and paragraphs, trying to write as perfect a draft as possible. Stopping to find the right word, or to figure out how to structure or punctuate a sentence, or to cross out a sentence I’d just written (we’re talking the pre-PC era here), I’d lose my train of thought. Frequently, referring to my outline would not put me back on track. I would discover inconsistencies in my planned argument. At times, new ideas would come. Some of these ideas were better than what I’d planned, so I’d happily insert them. At other times, though, the new ideas were good, sometimes very good, but didn’t “fit,” and I’d be faced with a quandary: totally rewrite what I had written so far or guiltily ignore what I’d newly discovered, knowing that what I had initially planned would be sufficient, if not as good as what I had just stumbled upon. This ethical dilemma was the worst of the trials I had to confront whenever I worked on extended writing projects. Composing a draft under such pressures made writing seem like self-torture.

And there was yet another layer to these difficulties. Many times, after preparing one of these painstaking outlines, solving argument/idea problems, I’d say to myself, “It’s all right here; too bad I can’t just turn this in.” Of course I knew I couldn’t and would set out, tired and somewhat bored, to complete that perfect draft. But, with almost all the excitement of discovering and connecting ideas over (except for the instances noted above), the writing felt like drudgery. It was boring to then find those words, structure them into sentences and punctuate them, while being as careful as possible to be correct and precise. And that mood was manifest in the texture, tone, and “style” of what resulted. While I almost always received good grades for these efforts—I had much to say, with many good insights, and presented it all in cogent arguments—few of my professors had much good to say about the style of my writing. Indeed, a few even pointed out the “less than lively” quality of my prose.

One would think that at some point during these years of struggle I would have stopped and asked myself how I might change things to improve this situation. But I didn’t. Everyone constantly spoke of the inherent difficulty of writing, so I attributed my troubles to that cause rather than to the way I went about the act of writing. In those days no one talked about the writing process or how there might be different ways to go about it.

It wasn’t until very late in my graduate school career, as I began to teach composition myself, that research in writing processes began to surface, revolutionizing the way composition would be taught and changing forever how I would go about writing and how I felt while I wrote. Especially revealing was Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers. My spine tingled in recognition as he described the two-step process I employed as a “formula for failure” (1) and delineated the myriad problems entailed by such a process. (2) It was as if he had been looking over my shoulder or recording my shouts of exasperation and growls of frustration all those years! This perfect reflection of what I had endured easily persuaded me to adopt and adapt his advice and change the way I went about composing.

Realizing (thanks to Mr. Elbow) that writing itself can be an act of discovering what I wanted to say, I set out to “break down” my process to more (not exactly discreet) phases—prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading—and soon discovered that there was no way I could not be logical as I put down my thoughts. Continuing to follow the author’s guidance, I spent less time on the planning stage and concentrated on getting my ideas down on paper as I put together a first draft, not worrying about anything but the ideas. Consequently, these drafts sometimes resembled Swiss cheese, blanks holding place for missing words and phrases—just enough language to capture my ideas. I would put off for later drafts the problem of finding the right word or phrase or sentence structure, procedures that used to hang me up and torture me in my old process. The additional phase of revision—real revision this time, where I focused on reading what I had written while still concentrating on ideas as much as possible, but now from the reader’s perspective—added newfound excitement as I wrote. Revision now involved reordering or further developing ideas, excising others, and creating whole new sections of discourse. Revision of this sort resulted in multiple, developing versions of any piece of writing. Best of all, it was liberating to save concerns about the right word or placement of a comma or semicolon to the later stages of editing or proofreading.

Since I’ve adopted this process of writing, I almost enjoy the prospect of writing something. I’ve been much more at ease when I write, which, among other things, makes it easier to think. Much of the stress has disappeared from my composing process. And, especially because revising is central to the entire process, I feel I succeed better in communicating with the reader. Having been so profoundly affected by this approach to writing, I make the writing process and the writer’s consciousness of it central to any writing class I teach. Likewise, it’s an ever-present and necessary subject of discussion at tutor training sessions and staff meetings at the Writing Center because, I’ve found, the lessons taught in Mr. Elbow’s classic work, now thirty-six years old, are insights to which every new generation of inexperienced writers needs exposure.

1 Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6.

2 Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5-7, 12-16.