Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, Jul 9, 1998 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 416 pages
A classic handbook for anyone who needs to write, Writing With Power speaks to everyone who has wrestled with words while seeking to gain power with them. Here, Peter Elbow emphasizes that the essential activities underlying good writing and the essential exercises promoting it are really not difficult at all. Employing a cookbook approach, Elbow provides the reader (and writer) with various recipes: for getting words down on paper, for revising, for dealing with an audience, for getting feedback on a piece of writing, and still other recipes for approaching the mystery of power in writing. In a new introduction, he offers his reflections on the original edition, discusses the responses from people who have followed his techniques, how his methods may differ from other processes, and how his original topics are still pertinent to today's writer. By taking risks and embracing mistakes, Elbow hopes the writer may somehow find a hold on the creative process and be able to heighten two mentalities--the production of writing and the revision of it. From students and teachers to novelists and poets, Writing with Power reminds us that we can celebrate the uses of mystery, chaos, nonplanning, and magic, while achieving analysis, conscious control, explicitness, and care in whatever it is we set down on paper.

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Contents

I SOME ESSENTIALS
3
II MORE WAYS OF GETTING WORDS ON PAPER
47
III MORE WAYS TO REVISE
121
IV AUDIENCE
177
V FEEDBACK
237
VI POWER IN WRITING
279
A Select Annotated Bibliography on Publishing prepared
375
Index
379
Copyright

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Page 176 - Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
Page 296 - THE Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man ? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect ? I am not a mechanical contrivance. Education ! Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress ? Anyhow, I defy you.
Page 177 - For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh; how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave...
Page 177 - How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen The compromise between reported and direct thought here seems to be due to Mrs.
Page 296 - ... The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio Diaz? There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience? Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be?
Page 296 - I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect ? I am not a mechanical contrivance. Education ! Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress ? Anyhow, I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to suppress me, according to your dummy standards. The ideal man ! And which is he, if you please ? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln ? The ideal man ! Roosevelt or Porfirio Diaz? There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here...

About the author (1998)

Peter Elbow is Professor of English and Director of the writing program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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