summary of Peter Elbow video

In Peter Elbow’s video he talked about his experience with writing. He is currently a professor of English but previously dropped out of school due to his struggle with writing. He discusses how he improved his writing skills and what methods worked for him. He uses his personal experiences to explain that it is ok to make mistakes. This is in fact how we learn. By failing we discover what went wrong and how we can improve it in order to succeed the next time around. Peter goes against what most teachers or professors suggest and tells us not to organize our ideas before writing. Many teachers I have known always say that creating an outline or a web of your ideas is the first step to writing a paper. Peter Elbow tells us that for him, the writing process was much easier whenever he didn’t organize his thoughts. He simply wrote down everything that came to his mind until he had more than enough information for the paper. He then went through and put things in their place and took out what wasn’t necessary, as if the paper were a puzzle. The last thing he talks about is creating and criticizing his own work. We can’t be afraid to critique our own writing because this is how we improve our writing.

Would Peter's method of making a mess and then cleaning it up really save time in the writing process?

Is it more beneficial to sit down and write a paper all at once, or to write a little bit at a time with breaks in between?