The joint at the bend of the arm , chapter 1

I enjoyed reading Elbow's first chapter. It made me realize that all of those random journals I used in my English classes while in middle and high school actually had a point. They were not merely a scheme by the teacher used to torture those students who hated to write. On the flip side, in middle/high school, the journals were not necessarily"free". Often times, topics were used to help with the writing, but our writing was graded. This could explain why many students have an editing complex. We knew it was going to be read by someone and graded so, as not to appear incompetent, we tried to make it look error free. Overall, I agree with Elbow on his belief that free writing is a useful tool for discovering good bits of information within the babble...I can use it now (and in my future classroom) and appreciate the technique, but I wish, as a younger student, we had more of these incidences.