Bringing Elbow into the Classroom

As I started to read this article, I felt like I had lost my bearings for a moment. What I in 8010 or in talking about formalism in my History of Poetics class. I nonetheless continued to read on, following the flow of Elbow's argument, and found myself increasingly anxious about what we were supposed to take away from this piece, particularly in terms of teaching composition. And, yet, about half way through the article I began to question why I was becoming so resistant. If I had read this article in a different setting, where the practical end was different, would I have the same respond? And, I'm not sure I would.

At this point, I felt the need to re-situate myself. How can we bring this article together? What can it offer us in terms of the composition classroom? In other words, I needed to play the believing and doubting game for a little bit. So, that's what I did. I went on believing. And, what did I find but something quite useful for the classroom.

Towards the end of Elbow's article, he talks about the convoluted nature of scholar's sentence structure, in that, often times, the longer seems to be better form. While one might wage the claim that such structures are necessary for complex ideas, what I found useful about this idea is how we assert similar ideas to students. As students enter college, we challenge them to move beyond the 5 paragraph essay and engage in college-level writing. This suggestion, however, does not always translate. Instead there can be a tendency to mirror this elongated sentence structures as indicative of a complex ideas. While, I believe, we all can immediately see the issue here, it also seems like a great place where Elbow's piece can come in. Perhaps we might benefit from helping students to see how words produce a flow and a particular energy, in that it may be a useful marker from crafting their prose.