The Writing Process Movement

Critical Questions:

According to The Givens in Our Conversations the fact that writing is a process is clear, but “As obvious as that might be, however, teachers of writing have until relatively recently been trained to behave as literary critics—looking at texts so as to analyze what happens within those texts” (18). How did Current Traditional Rhetoric embed and sustain this approach to judging writing? Why are composition teachers who behave like literary critics dangerous? What are the implications? How does a shift to a writing process perspective change this?

Emig writes about the connection between writing and learning, observing how the struggles that characterize successful learning, “include the importance of the classic attributes of re-inforcement and feedback” (27). How does the writing process support the learning process of reinforcement and feedback? What kind of writing feedback and reinforcement encourages and engages student learning?

What were some of the general purposes, ideas, goals, and arguments of the process movement?

The writing process movement aimed to shift composition curriculum and assessment from focusing on the product to focusing on the process. Writing process scholars, including Murray, Emig, and Sommers who built off of expressivist pedagogy to argue for a pedagogical approach that teaches writing as a process for learning. In section one of Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, the author asserts that "writing is a process. But that doesn't mean that at the end of the process there won't be a product. The idea is to place greater emphasis on the process than on the product” (19). Even though the writing process movement argued that composition curriculum should focus on teaching writing as a process, process scholars didn't dismiss the importance of teaching students how to create effective final products. Instead, more attention and effort would go towards elongating the writing process to evoke meta-cognition about the multitude of rhetorical decisions students make when composing. Murray writes about the writing process in his article, "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product", asking "What is the process we should teach? It is the process of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world” (Murray 21). Murray's emphasis on the writing process is rooted in expressivist pedagogy. Murray advocates for the student's voice and for creating classrooms that accept and encourage student curiosity, self-exploration, and investigation. He also notes how language is a tool that helps us learn about our world and think critically about our world and the way we want to change it. In Janet Emig's "Writing as a Mode of Learning," Emig further emphasizes the relationship between the learning process and the writing process, claiming that “Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (Emig 24). Emig uses cognitive theory to investigate the parallels between successful learning strategies and attributes of the writing process and product, including receiving feedback (externally and self) and revising, creating a formative feedback loop.

The Writing Process Movement furthered the agenda of the Expressivist movement by disproving the theories supporting Current Traditional Rhetoric pedagogy. In CTR, writing is viewed as transcribed talking. Writing was believed to be innate and come from a spiritual and mystical place outside the self. Good writing expertly portrays a truth that is external to the individual. But Emig, built on recent cognitive and anthropological research, identifies key differences between writing and talking, including that "Writing is a learned behavior; talking is natural, even irrepressible, behavior," "Writing then is an artificial process; talking is not," and that "Writing is a technological device" (26). In CTR, the purpose of the composition classroom was to correct, fix, and judge a final product that was typically prompted within extremely specific parameters. Since instructors believed in a single, external truth, all writing supposedly should look the same in order to be correct. And often, writing was connected to etiquette, and the use of good grammar was synonymous with properness, virtue, and morals. The Writing Process and Expressivist movements spoke out against this view of writing and instead imagined a composition classroom that embraced student voice instead of suppressing it. Then how should we teach our writing curriculum? Murray points out how “This is not a question of correct or incorrect, of etiquette or custom” (21). Instead, we should be looking at how writing can enhance individual learning instead of simply training our students how to pass a grammatical etiquette exam.