solved Your writing assignment for Thurs 4/22 is to try to

Your writing assignment for Thurs 4/22 is to try to get some “cooking” going. Peter Elbow uses the metaphors of “growing” and “cooking” to describe his model for the writing process. “Think of writing…not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message,” he writes in Chapter 2 (15). He also wants us to think of writing not so much as a reflection of our current thinking but “a transaction with words whereby you free yourself from what you presently think, feel, and perceive” (15). Elbow is not saying that writing to convey our current thinking is always a bad idea. Nor is he saying that after we’re done with a piece of writing we should believe the opposite of what we thought when we started. What he means is that we develop our thinking in writing. Writing is thinking; it is a tool of expanding our capacity for thought and perception. Elbow’s idea of “cooking” is key to this way of thinking about writing. In Chapter 3, Elbow describes the cooking aspect of the writing process as “the interaction of contrasting material” (49), or “one idea or perception refracted through or seen through the lens of another” (57). There are a bunch of different forms this kind of interaction can take. It can be interactions between people, between ideas, between working with words (writing-out) and working with ideas (summing-up), between metaphors, between modes, and between you and symbols on paper (or between you and not-you). Choosing images and using them to think and write about ideas about visual culture is a way of refracting one idea through the lens of another. I found Elbow’s section on “noncooking” very helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of what he means by “cooking.” This use of the opposite concept to elaborate on his idea of cooking nicely illustrates an “interaction of contrasting material.” In Elbow’s discussion of noncooking, the form of interaction that seems most relevant is the one between writing-out and summing-up. Personally, I enjoy writing-out, but I often find summing-up difficult, so I resist doing it. The perfectionist in me wants to do it perfectly, and this stage of developing new ideas is inherently messy and imperfect. (A little perfectionism is helpful later, during the final, editing stage of writing.)The summing-up process sounds similar to what Elbow describes in Chapter 2 in his discussion of the “emerging center of gravity” (35). There he writes: “If you are having difficulty getting a center of gravity to emerge [in your writing], the cure is to force yourself to make lots of summings-up even if they don’t fit your material or seem to be right” (35).For this writing assignment, your aim is to try to get some “cooking” going in your writing process by experimenting with one of the forms of interaction that Elbow describes in Chapter 3. In other words, experiment with putting contrasting material or modes of writing in interaction. Don’t worry too much about getting it right–just try to experiment with it in a relaxed way. One approach would be to start with a topic, idea, or image, and write through a cycle of (1) writing-out; (2) summing-up; (3) writing-out (based on your first sum-up); then (4) summing-up your second “write-out.” You could even do it one more time if things felt like they were cooking. Or, you could think of this writing exercise as a conversation between you and not-you. Use any of the forms of “cooking as interaction between ___________” that Elbow describes in Ch 3.