Elbow- Freewriting and Growing

Freewriting is a term that I came to learn when I was in my Sophomore year in college. Up until then it has always been writing a paper the night before it was due. Some of Elbow's comments are certainly appealing such as "producing garbage is okay." It is so true that most of the time we are so obsessed with organized and error free writing that we end up spending so much time on editing. If we freewrote regularly, without stopping and going back to correct our grammar and punctuation every two seconds, we would be able to pour more focus and energy into that piece of writing. I know this helps because I had to freewrite for English 015 class and believe it or not it did more good than bad. I was writing a 20 page research piece for that class and the professor almost forced us to freewrite for ideas. And sure enough as I started writing "garbage" and focused less on being proper and correct, I generated a couple of extremely strong ideas int he span of 10 minutes, which I even used for my thesis statements for the final paper!

In chapter 2 Elbow talks about growing how we as living organisms grow but our words do not grow. As we grow our perceptions change, but the words barely change. That fascinated me a lot. Like Elbow, I believe that it is important for us to treat words as if they have the potential to "grow."And then he explains the four stages of growth. The one that was the most interesting was "Chaos and Disorientation."He says, "Growth in writing is not just producing masses of words and then throwing the rejects away." I believe this to be true. I think to come up with a good piece of writing we need to write a lot and then edit some parts of it, but not throwing chunks of writing just because it does not look right. We need to work with those chunks and derive better ideas from those pieces we reject. That is why it is so important to lose control and just write because in my experience , that leads to better quality. And that is why it is important to write several drafts before editing the final piece.

So overall, I would say I am inspired and encouraged by Elbow's ideas. The problem isthat we need to sacrifice a lot of our time to doing all that he said, and that is difficult for a college student and that is why we back off and lose interest. But after reading these chapters I definitely feel more strongly about freewriting and losing control in particular.