Most people correct and edit their text as they write it down. Why write something that needs to be rewritten later? This is one of the reasons people write this way. Peter Elbow shows that, in most cases, this is a very inefficient way of writing a text and offers several methods that can improve the creative process of writing any text.
When writing any piece of text, the internal editor can impede the creative process. Peter Elbow postulates that writers can get tangled in a web of editing and revising when producing a sentence or a paragraph. “Most people experience an awkward and sometimes paralyzing translating process in writing: ’Let's see, how shall I say this.’ Freewriting helps you learn to just say it.” (Elbow 15) Figuring out how
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For the first half, the voyage out, you do pieces of almost-freewriting during which you allow yourself to curve out into space—allow yourself, that is, to ignore or even forget exactly what your topic is. For the second half, the voyage home, you bend your efforts back into the gravitational field of your original topic as you select, organize, and revise parts of what you produced during the voyage out. (Elbow 60)
Loop writing forces the writer to view the subject from a different angle. The first half of the process the writer is free to explore different ideas, while the second half forces the writer to link these ideas to the original topic. This exercise in association can yield ideas that might not have surfaced when staying close to the original topic. Loop writing in combination with freewriting can be a powerful tool to keep the creative process going even when there is no inspiration on the original topic.
Other methods described by Elbow do not focus on creating the content, but on editing and revising the content. While these methods can be employed to battle writers’ block at a later stage of the writing process, these methods can potentially offer insights not gained by methods focused on creating content. Editing and revising requires content be edited or revised and this needs text to have been