Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow is a Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also directed the Writing Program from 1996 until 2000. He writes about theory, practice, and pedagogy, and has authored several books and a number of papers. His practices in regard to editing and revising are now widely accepted and taught as the writing process. The invention technique freewriting is dubbed as a "student-centered movement".

Biography

In the introduction to the second edition of Writing Without Teachers, Elbow says that his interest in writing practices came from his own difficulty with writing. He attended Proctor Academy and Williams College from 1953 to 1957. While at the University of Oxford on scholarship from Williams, he was unable to write the assigned essays. When he began his PhD in English at Harvard University, his writing difficulties persisted, causing him to leave in the first year of his studies. Elbow began teaching, first as an instructor at MIT from 1960–1963, and then as one of nine founding members of Franconia College from 1963-1965. It was at Franconia where Elbow discovered he could write more easily when writing for colleagues or students rather than as an assigned piece.