Read Peter Elbow, Professor Who Transformed Freshman Comp, Dies at 89 by Michael S. Rosenwald (New York Times)

His struggles with writer’s block led him to create a process that favored an expressive, personal approach over rigid academic conventions that often stifled students.

For those interested in writing methods, Peter Elbow’s work can be seen as an interesting shift in pedagogy from the 1970s. Interestingly it relies on pieces of practices pre-dating him which inform commonplace book and related zettelkasten methods.

For my own files, from the obituary, it looks like he was using an IBM Selectric I in some of his early work.