Introduction to the Writing Process Movement (1971-1985(??))

• In this era, for the first time in our intellectual history (surprising, no?), people thought to bring the methodologies of scientific observation and inductive reasoning (visual: English Professors in lab coats) to the examination of what people do when they write. 
• Prior to this era, people had, of course, thought about how writing works.  Previous examinations of the writing process consisted, primarily, of narratives by (or interviews with) authors or literary critics or, often, poets, which provided fairly idiosyncratic accounts of how works were inspired, or the process of composing written works. These literary accounts didn't really connect with the fairly technical, prescriptive nature of most Comp instruction.

Early Studies

• (1971) Janet Emig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders.  She asked the research question, "How do 12th Graders Write?" (a question that's of obvious importance to freshman comp instructors, right?).  Her method of answering the question involved a breakthrough methodology--the compose-aloud protocol.   In eight individual case studies, she asked students to say whatever crossed their minds as they composed.  We'll read the introductory review of literature to her study.
• (1975) Donald Graves's "An Examination of the Writing Processes of Seven-Year-Old Children."  Graves observes and talks to his 2nd grade research subjects, talks to their parents and teachers, and writes alongside them.  He finds that even young children's writing processes are not linear--that they often revise while they compose and compose while they edit.
• (1979) Sondra Perl's "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers." Perl studies "basic" or "remedial" or "pre-college" writers.  She uses compose-aloud protocols, and develops a coding scheme to systematize those protocols.  This method enables her to see certain patterns.  We'll read her essay.
• (1980) Linda Flower and John Hayes, "The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem."  Used the "information-processing" approach to psychology as a way of framing the writing process.  Writers were given problems to solve, and asked to think aloud and compose aloud in their process of solving them. 
• (1980) Nancy Sommers's, "All Writing is Revision."  Argues that students are given too narrow a definition of revision (the thing you do at the end, before you turn it in), when in fact the whole process of composing is involved with word-changes, false starts, even re-thinkings of whole philosophical positions.  Her work may be indicative of a shift in Comp studies--from the production of new experimental findings to the basis of new theory and pedagogy on those findings.
• (1983) Ann Berthoff's "The Intelligent Eye and the Thinking Hand."  Suggest that experimentalist approaches to the study of writing process aren't really valid.  To study writing, we need to look at writing in social context.  This particular objection would, in my opinion, unwind the process movement.  Later work in comp studies would echo Berthoff, and search for more situated, contextual ways of studying writing in its social context.  However, the process movement succeeded in emphasizing the importance of what writers do, not simply what they produce.  Writing teachers in the post-process era understand that their job isn't to fix students' papers, but to improve students' writing.