Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process

An indispensable handbook for anyone who needs to write, from the student writing an essay to the professional writer working on a story to the manager writing a memo for a tight deadline, Peter Elbow's Writing with Power speaks to everyone who has wrestled with words while seeking to gain power with them. Elbow argues that writing with power doesn't just mean getting power over words and readers; it also means getting power over yourself and over the writing process. He stresses the importance of knowing what you are doing as you write. Acknowledging that writing calls on the opposing skills of creativity and critical thinking, Elbow recommends that students separate the writing process into two stages by using the two skills alternately and allowing each to enhance the other.

Whatever your reason for writing, Peter Elbow has a "recipe" to guide you. A longtime proponent of "freewriting" (writing without stopping, for a preset amount of time), Elbow incorporates its use in a variety of ways. Have a limited amount of time? Spend half of it freewriting and half of it cleaning up your prose. Got all the time in the world (and only a vague sense of what you want to say)? Freewrite, then focus, then freewrite, then focus, repeatedly, until you get "a trustworthy vision of your final piece of writing." Elbow offers a plethora of prompts for priming the creative pump, as well as several ways to revise the piece of writing that results: thorough revising, revising with feedback, cutting and pasting, proofreading, and the like. He pays close attention to the ways in which focusing on an audience can assist or interfere in the writing process, including a terrific chapter on the strangeness of writing for teachers, in which "your task is usually to explain what you are still engaged in trying to understand to someone who understands it better." And he provides an excellent section on how to solicit the kind of feedback you want. Though it is a new edition of a 1981 book, there is nothing tired about Writing with Power: it provides many tools to help a writer feel empowered throughout the writing process. --Jane Steinberg