Are We Already Effective Temporal Writers?

One thing I find so refreshing about Peter Elbow is how I recognize my own tendencies in what he describes.  To some extent, this is the same with Boice, but that's in a more intellectual, theoretical way.  With Elbow, once he surfaces from the theoretical and deals with the concrete, I realize that I'm more or less on board with him.

This brings me to why I found the exploratory paper so difficult.  Elbow writes that "[i]f a piece of writing were really a record of all the writer's thinking as it occurred in the process, it would almost inevitably be a wandering mess" (640).  Elbow recognizes and articulates what I continually found while writng: that it is hard for a trained writer to be so frustratingly informal.  Of course, Elbow has all of the same good things to say about enactive writing that we've already discussed in class; it is an effective way to feel out multiple sides of an argument, to lead yourself through your research and effectively analyze all available points of view.  All of this, I understand.  What I most appreciated was Elbow's focusing on why he understands that kind of writing might be difficult to read or to compose.

There were other moments when I also recognized my own writing tendencies in Elbow.  The dynamic outline, for instance, is far more along the lines of what I've been using for years than the static one is.  Obviously the way Elbow translated binding writing temporally from the narrative to the nonnarrative captured me, a primarily narrative writer.  Do I construct my academic essays in the same frame of mind as my stories?  I can't say I do, although there is something of the more active, creative element going on the more engaged I am with a piece.  In Elbow's itch-and-scratch talk, I recognized all of the "But where is the conflict?" questions from my creative writing workshops throughout the years.  The talk about voice is all creative, nebulous; ethos is "the most powerful of the three sources of persuasion" indeed (643).  Many of the things I began to do writing essays once I started to think of essay-writing as "fun" line up with many of Elbow's observations on temporal writing.  As a creative writer who has only just begun to think of essays more and more creatively, Elbow's temporal lessons had lots of advice for ways I might speed up that process.

I'm not sure I've been converted entirely to thinking about essays temporally.  I'm still quite visual; Elbow's earlier critiques of the ways in which we as writers pigeonhole writing into the spacial parts of our minds includes a mention of visual planning, flowcharts and the like.  I love mapping out essays, both for myself and for tutees in the Writing Center.  On a fundamental level, Elbow concedes that the spacial element will not disappear; ultimately, he concludes that the two can and should work together, rather than canceling each other out.