Think of writing then not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message. Writing is a way to end up thinking something you couldn't have started out thinking. 48-75 on the cooking metaphor. Once you have gradually grown your meaning and specified it to yourself clearly, you will have an easier time finding the best language for it. It is, contends Elbow, in looking back on what we have written that we find the meaning for which we have been searching.
Schools tend to emphasize success and thereby undermine learning.
When the price of failure is very high, a learner tends to close himself off from improvement . . . You can't improve your writing unless you put out words differently from the way you put them out now and find out how these new kinds of writing are experienced. Note Henriette Anne Klauser, in Writing on Both Sides of the Brain argues that creating and criticizing are radically different kinds of skills because they emanate from different spheres of the brain.