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Writing process

Process in which words and phrases are formed to produce a text

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  • 3 chapters

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Historical and contemporary perspectives

In 1972, Donald M. Murray published a brief manifesto titled "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product", in which he argued that English teachers' conventional training in literary criticism caused them to hold students' work to unhelpful standards of highly polished "finished writing". Teachers, he explained, ought to focus less on correcting students' written products and focus more on involving students in "discovery through language", which Murray believed for "most writers most of the time" involved a process: i.e., stages of "pre-writing, writing and rewriting". Though Murray was not alone in advocating process-based instruction, this manifesto is regarded as a landmark vocalization of the differences between process and product orientations in the teaching of writing. Donald Murray mentioned that writing is to be considered as a process, not a product. In other words, he viewed getting the writers to work their way in order to discover new things rather than reach an end. He viewed writing as a journey of revision and development by which one discovers insights and develops thinking. Within a decade, Maxine Hairston was to observe that the teaching of writing had undergone a transformation in moving from a focus on written products to writing processes.

These categories were theorized more fully in subsequent scholarship. For example, pre-writing was defined by Project English experimental researcher D. Gordon Rohman as the "sort of 'thinking' [that] precedes writing" and the "activity of mind which brings forth and develops ideas, plans, designs". According to Rohman, writing begins "at the point where the 'writing idea' is ready for the words and the page". Student testimony of Rohman's research being effective can be seen here; "I was brought to an awareness of the world about me that I had just taken for granted. I really began to 'see.'" Even today, much "process-based" teaching has continued to broadly conceptualize writing processes along these three phases. Some have linked this three-stage process to the five canons of rhetoric: pre-writing to invention and arrangement, writing to style, revising to delivery and sometimes memory.

While contemporary research on writing processes still accepts that some kind of process is necessarily involved in producing any written text, it now collectively endorses "the fundamental idea that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist". In this view, "writing processes are historically dynamic – not psychic states, cognitive routines, or neutral social relationships". In terms of "pre-writing" for instance, writing processes often begin long before any visible documentable work or easily categorizable steps are observable. From the contemporary perspective of composition studies, it is thus inaccurate to assume that any authentic writing process (i.e., one not contrived as part of a school assignment or laboratory setting) necessarily involves a linear sequence of "stages". Rather different kinds of activities emerge as overlapping parts of a complex whole or parts of a repeating process that can be repeated multiple times throughout anyone's process of composing a particular document. For example, writers routinely discover that editorial changes trigger brainstorming and a change of purpose; that drafting is temporarily interrupted to correct a misspelling; or that the boundary between pre-writing and drafting is less than obvious.

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