Wonderfully Specific Advice

Elbow has obviously been involved in many writing classes and knows the pitfalls. I myself took several post-college, non-credit, creative writing classes, and while I enjoyed all of them, there were several problems in each. Most typically, people's critiques of fellow students' writings were nebulous... i.e. "I really liked it" or "there was something about it I just couldn't relate to."
Elbow's suggestions for summarizing the meaning of a work of writing (p.86) and describing a reader's reactions in terms of metaphor ("showing", p. 90) are wonderfully specific, and I wish we had been given them in my classes.

Another problem that's pretty universal in writing classes is people's discomfort with having others critique their writing. Elbow's "Advice to the Writer on Listening" (p. 101-106) does a great job of explaining what the purposes of criticism are, and how writers should process and evaluate the criticism. I especially liked his advice of "don't apologize for your writing" because I remember one student who drove everyone crazy by prefacing his writing with "oh, this is really dumb." (I later found out this guy was a former circus clown, but that's another story.)

I also agree that a good writing class should be neither too nice nor too combative. I was once in a class that eventually turned into a mutual admiration society, and while I loved hearing what was good in my writing, I would have learned more if I'd been told what could have been improved or expanded. In contrast, another Fiction Writing class had certain students who got into constant, predictable arguements. It got so bad that I thought the class should have been called Friction Writing rather than Fiction Writing!

I think this chapter is one that writing teachers and students should be required to read. I can also see it being something that teachers would refer to year after year.