Writing without Teachers

Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers, which I first encountered in 1974, changed the way I thought about writing and freed me from one of my chief impediments: the idea that I had to work out in my head, or in an outline, what I wanted to say before I wrote anything down. By introducing the concept of freewriting, Elbow made it possible to start anywhere, and trust that the process of writing without a teacher, and without editing, would be sufficient to get core ideas down, which later editing and revising could polish into something that might never have come to be, using the method drilled into me in high school and college.

This is the most helpful book about writing I've ever read. Elbow advocates free, almost unconscious writing, followed of course by rigorous revision. While the traditional approach has the writer picking a topic and setting up a structure, Elbow argues that one can discover one's subject and one's organization through the act of writing.

This book is amazing and every teacher of every subject at every level should read it. That includes you, too, you fancy pants professors of whatever it is you know so much about.
It is the best philosophy that a person can have for education. I don't even feel a little bit hesitant to use such superlative terms to describe this book.

Free writing does work.