Clarification about "blurting"

In my last post, I declared that I had created the genre of "airport blurting," a type of freewriting done in notepads by weary travelers who are waiting to board their planes (its usefulness in the genre foodchain is something akin to that of napkin doodling). I feel, however, compelled to give Peter Elbow some credit for the "blurting" part--as he is the first person I ever knew who used the term "blurt" in reference to writing--I love that, because I love anything that seeks to collapse the distance between writing and speaking. The following is a fantastic point Elbow makes about how much more clarity we can achieve if we just write it like we say it--we are (I think) so much more honest when we speak than when we write:

“When writers have to produce brief abstracts for long journal articles, they usually come up with paroxysms of nominalization, embedding, and lexical density. Yet most abstracts could be just as short if they were written in the blunt blurted language the writer would use over a beer if you said, “Damn it, what is your article actually saying?” Bar-stool colloquialisms could easily be edited out, and the result would be correct literate writing--and clear and brief.” (This excerpt is taken from a manuscript Elbow is working on, hence there is no correct MLA citation).

So, the concept of freewriting as blurting is quite useful if we can bring ourselves to admit that (gasp!) blurting, the spoken version, itself is quite useful in helping us to get to the core of our ideas. The point is that writing alone is often not enough to lead to good writing--speech, in many cases, is crucial in achieving elegant, blunt, witty, clear, razor-sharp, and/or perspicacious prose.

Writing all this has made me want to revisit Bakhtin and see how his writings on speech genres could further explicate the spectrum of spoken/written discourses.