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.