"Elbow is his own best argument for speaking onto the page: His voice is both authoritative and affable, conversational and professorial." --Erin McKean, International Herald Tribune
"...[S]urely some of the best work [Elbow] has done in his long and brilliant career....Elbow's book talks the talk and walks the walk: it is itself a demonstration of his subtitle--what speech can bring to writing....Bravo to Peter Elbow for this learned, provocative, and forward-looking book." --Andrea A. Lunsford, award-winning author of The St. Martin's Handbook
"Whether you aim to improve your own writing, help others improve theirs, understand more about written language, or just want to enjoy enthusiastic, passionate writing at its best, this book is for you. With a disarmingly simple thesis about what spoken language contributes to writing, Vernacular Eloquence makes major contributions to theory and to practice." --David Barton, author of Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language
"it is written in Peter Elbow's wonderfully approachable, affable voice; it emphasizes the need to indulge one's own impetus when writing, to pour oneself into "freewrites" ... The book is organized in a unique and purposeful manner ... Highly recommended." --E. McCourt, Jacksonville University, CHOICE.
REVIEWS OF VERNACULAR ELOQUENCE
"A new book argues that people would write better if they connected better with their true 'mother tongue': spoken language... [Elbow] says, "Let's welcome unplanned speech for the rich resources it has, even for careful writing..." [W]e all, Elbow argues, have enough power in the spoken language we learned at home to make us effective writers." --R. Walker, The Christian Science Monitor.
"As Peter Elbow embarks on his fifth decade as a central contributor the national conversation on writing pedagogy, his new book -Vernacular Eloquence- is at once no surprise at all and also a colossal surprise... [W]ho would have predicted that Elbow's latest work would be his most ambitious, his most theoretically sophisticated, and quite possibly his most significant?" --T.R. Johnson, Tulane University.
"Vernacular Eloquence amasses much of Elbow's research and experiences in teaching literacy through orality, contributing to the field a philosophy of writing that is timely, needed, and exceptionally eloquent in its own right... Elbow offers a framework to help learners draw upon speech abilities-or traits which come much more naturally to most of us-as a platform not only to create effective prose, but also to revise prose, a task central to effective writing... We have no doubt that Vernacular Eloquence will be one of the 21st century's pivotal works." --J. Hoermann, R. Enos, Texas Christian University.
"Vernacular Eloquence [is] in many ways your magnum opus, a work that pulls together and extends a life of scholarly and practical explorations of writing and speaking... I think readers will love how much is here, how you seem to have gone on a hunt for every bit of knowledge and perspective you could find about speech and writing... [and] deploy it in a highly reflective claim about the rootedness of writing in speaking." --C. Anson, North Carolina State University.
"It might feel like a silly exercise, but reading your work out loud can be enlightening." --K. Lee, Forbes.com.
