Process+Writing

At its most basic, "process writing" is the idea that student writers must learn how to write rather than what to write. That is, when teaching writing, the steps that the writer takes to produce writing (the process) are vastly more important to learning than the production of a stellar final product delivered to the teacher. This countered the approach where students are presented an example of strong writing and told to do the same, without any notion of how to get from A to B.

Donald Murray, one of the most prominent voices in the process writing movement, in A Writer Teaches Writing (first published in 1968), likened traditional writing instruction to magic. Students were taught that they somehow had to pull great essays out of thin air, like a magician: "writing may appear magic, but it is our responsibility to take our students backstage to watch the pigeons being tucked up the magician's sleeve." Magicians train for innumerable hours to convince their audience that they are performing impossible feats, writers should focus on those hours of training and only then will they be able to perform the feats. Read Murray's excellent, short "Teach Writing as Process Not Product" here: http://www.willamette.edu/gse/owp/docs/TeachWritingasaProcessNotProduct.pdf.

In the 70's, Donald Graves started doing research with younger writers (Murray taught college composition) and integrating the process model into writing through primary and secondary school. Through this time, the process model was seen as a way of meeting writers on their own terms. For instance, there was great emphasis on letting them choose topics, on individual voices, and on personal relevance. The goal was not to emulate good writing, but on developing good, unique writers.

The nitty gritty is what we're all familiar with (since process writing became the norm by the late 70's/early 80's): writers have to go through Prewriting, Drafting, Revising, Editing, and Publishing (or some minor variation of those). While these were originally supposed to be fluid, personalized steps in an individual writer's process, they quickly became regimented. By the 90's, Tina Gordon is calling the writing process a "monolith, a method that may teachers and texts have packaged into a neat, uniform formula" (1996). Rather than providing individualized access to the writing process, students are walked through an assembly-line-like process: one day on prewriting (always mind maps, or always outlines), a day or two to draft, etc. The prewriting stage, which for Murray and Graves was the most personal, often becomes so regimented that it loses all meaning and relevance. The "process" thus becomes a step-by-step program for producing passable, easily graded writing. Rather than being a process for individuals to access their writing ability, it becomes a process to make evaluation standardized and easier for teachers (see the 5 paragraph essay).

The early proponents of process writing were really on to something, though. In fact, the "post-process" movement, associated with folks like Nancy Atwell (Taylor, 2000), is trying to move the focus of the writing process away from the process itself, back to an individual student center.

Murray, D. M. (1985). //A writer teaches writing//. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Gordon, T. (1996). Teaching writing in the 1990s. //English Journal//, 85(6), 37-41. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/819825

Taylor, M. M. (2000). Nancie Atwell's "In the Middle" and the ongoing transformation of the writing workshop. //English Journal//, 90(1), 46-52. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/821730 