Teaching Theory
When artists and musicians aim to compose a work of art, whether it be painting, or a song, they go through a process. Painters begin with a blank canvas; songwriters begin with setting lyrics to notes. The steps artists and composers take to arrive at a final piece are often unique and take time. Oftentimes, composing a piece of which these artists can be proud to share with an audience takes time, rethinking, reworking, and even starting over. Writing is no different. Composing a polished piece of writing involves going through steps of fleshing out ideas, organizing and making sense of those ideas for an intended audience, discussing choices made, and reworking ideas, again and sometimes again, in order to arrive at publishable piece. While the field of composition has moved away from process theory, there is still merit to what it can provide. Because students can still benefit from engaging in a writing process, I’d like to present this theory in from a new perspective.
Before discussing how educators might revitalize writing process theory, however, it is first necessary to explain its grounding. The process approach to writing places emphasis on the steps writers take to compose a product more than the product itself. In an article titled, “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product,” Donald Murray emphasizes the importance of teaching writing with this in mind. He explains that teachers (and students) often become frustrated with writing because the focus is usually on the product rather than the process students take to construct a writing piece. He highlights that this approach does “little more than confirm their lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves…” (3). Instead, he proposes the writing process as a mode of learning, a “process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language” (4). Murray breaks this learning process down into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting (4). The approaches to each step are individual to each student. While students may approach each step of the process differently, all writers will engage with each step in some way (Murray 4).
In the article, “Invention and Drafting in the Digital Age: New Approaches to Thinking about Writing,” Tina Bacci explains several ways students can use technology to engage in the writing process. Bacci asserts that “there are many ways we can use the technology readily at hand in most classrooms to change the way writing is envisioned – in ways that add meaningful change” (76). She explains several ways technology can be used to engage in writing projects, including stages of the writing process such as brainstorming, drafting, workshopping, and outlining ideas.
Brainstorming/Prewriting
When I assign students a writing task, I understand that to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to drafting is harmful, as students all enter the classroom with different experiences. With this in mind, students are encouraged to figure out the technique that best works for them. This may be scribbling ideas on a paper, typing out a list of ideas on their computer, or even discussing ideas with a classmate. The beginning stages of writing are low stakes, as students need to be afforded the opportunity to discover and process through ideas.
Bacci offers an updated brainstorming technique compared to traditional pen to paper methods. She describes a process through which students type key words into a search engine such as Google and make note of the articles or websites generated by the search. This exposes students to a wide range of information written about the topics and is an exercise intended to inspire interest in continued research (76). While this is a simple activity, it brings technology into the classroom and allows students to engage with their topics in a meaningful way.
While the first stages of writing may look messy, the processes students go through to structure their thoughts into coherent sentences, paragraphs, and full essay drafts sometimes seem to take on lives of their own. In these stages, the writing process occurs in what Maxine Hairston identifies as “recursive, convoluted, and uneven” in the article “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing.” Hairston also describes how students learn this process “intuitively and not methodically” (85). She explains how students “write, place, revise, anticipate, and review throughout the writing process, moving back and forth among the different operations involved in writing without any apparent plan” (Hairston 85). While writing may look haphazard at these stages, students engage in a learning process that works for them on an individual basis.
One of the strategies I find most effective when leading students through the writing process are workshop sessions during which students are encouraged to share their ideas and progress with one another, as well as continue drafting. During these writing workshops, as students discuss their drafts and flesh out ideas with one another, I assume the role as facilitator, doing my best to allow the sessions to be student-led, and proceed with their writing projects as needed. More than learning from me, it is important for students to learn from one another. Most importantly, if the primary goal of a writing course is for students to learn and improve upon writing skills, it is vital that they have the opportunity to practice writing. These notions are reflected in a drafting exercise Bacci describes through which the students use PowerPoint to present the beginning stages of their essays to their peers (77). The students are asked “to share their developing project designs to present their works in progress rather than their finished product” (77). Bacci explains that in doing this activity, students are also more willing to receive and employ the feedback they receive from peers at this stage because they are sharing their highlights of their works in progress instead of finished pieces. Students are less intimidated by making changing at this stage than revising a completed draft (77). Bacci’s suggestions bring new perspective to how students can benefit from the drafting process. Furthermore, these activities demonstrate how students can learn from one another through engaging in interactive workshop activities. While students still engage in brainstorming, drafting, and workshopping, Bacci’s suggestions bring a newness to process theory through the use of technology.
Writing
Just as students adopt individualistic approaches to prewriting, so do they discover unique drafting and revision strategies. While I do required students to produce several essay drafts in any given unit, the methods students employ to make changes to each draft are largely personal to each student. In the essay “Composing Behaviors of One-and-Multi-Draft Writers,” Muriel Harris explores the varying ways through which students approach writing tasks. Harris identifies a spectrum of writers that engage with writing and drafting techniques at varying levels (178). She notes that there are those writers, whom she defines as “one-drafters,” efficient writers who mentally engage in a process of prewriting, writing, and revising, and compose a writing piece in one draft (187). Harris explains that “Multi-drafters, on the other hand, need to interact with their transcriptions in order to revise. Independent of how much planning they do or pre-text they compose, they continue to revise after they have transcribed words onto paper” (178). Harris explains that neither types of writer have been trained to approach writing this way (178). With this in mind, the most effective way to lead students through a writing process is to coach them to identify and use strategies that best work for who they are as learners and budding writers.
Revising
Just as it is beneficial to allow students to take the reigns during the drafting process and provide opportunities to discuss ideas with classmates, I would also argue that it is advantageous for students to learn from each other during the revision process. In one classroom, it is common to work with students who have varied experiences with writing. There may be a few skilled writers who seem to navigate the writing process with ease, while the majority of writers are new to exploring the techniques with which they are more comfortable. It could be beneficial to allow writers of varying levels with opportunities to learn from one another during the writing process. In an essay titled “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Nancy Sommers investigates the revision strategies of student writers and experienced writers and presents a study that examines “the revision process of student writers and experienced writers to see what role revision played in their writing processes” (380). The study indicates one difference between student and experienced writers is the students writers’ limited ability to apply revisions strategies to their work (383). Instead of going through a substantive revision process of reorganizing paragraphs or restricting ideas, students rearranged or chose different words to use. Ultimately the revision strategies employed by student writers involved sentence-level changes. Sommers explains that students admit that while they know more substantial revisions needed to be done, they lacked the set of strategies to help them identify what those revisions might be. Ultimately, students lacked to skills to make more substantial revisions to their essays (383). Providing inexperienced writers the opportunities to discuss revisions strategies with skilled writers would be a productive learning experience, and potentially equip novice writers with the skills necessary to improve their own writing strategies.
In an effort to bring fresh perspective to peer review and revision techniques, Jack Dougherty describes how he uses Google Docs to lead students through peer review activities in his essay, “Co-Writing, Peer Editing, and Publishing in the Cloud.” Dougherty explains how he “adopted the Google Docs platform to support simultaneous commenting with multiple readers, both inside and outside of our classroom” (67). He describes the process he went through over several semesters to discover the best ways to employ the web-based tool successfully (68). Doughtery’s techniques of using web-based tools to engage students in peer review activities bring fresh perspective to the value of process-based approach to writing.
Publishing
At the end of the revision process, my students compose a piece that is most commonly referred to as a “final draft;” however, I would argue that writing is never truly finished. Writing can always be changed, altered, edited, revised, and made new. Murray explains that “instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writing, and glory in its unfinishedness” (4). This approach takes the pressure off of students to compose a perfect piece of writing, and inspires them to engage in the process of learning. Furthermore, while students are still expected to adhere to course deadlines, the process and speed through which they arrive at a final draft can be flexible. Emig identifies that “One writes best as one learns best, at one’s own pace” (126). If the purpose is to engage students in a positive learning experience, students’ writing process should not be rushed. Murray encourages that students must be allowed to “explore the writing process in their own way, some fast, some slow, whatever it takes for them…to find their own truth” (6).
Donald Murray identifies teachers as “coaches, encouragers, developers, creators of environments in which [students] can experience the writing process for themselves” (5). This is my goal as a teacher. Too often, at the start of a semester, students regard writing as an arduous task. Whether it is due to lack of confidence, or negative past experiences with writing, students often enter the classroom reluctant to fully engage. My aim as a composition instructor is to promote an environment in which students can be comfortable to discover techniques that they are excited to use without the added expectation of creating a perfect writing piece. My hope is to guide students to discover a process of learning that feels right to them.
Works Cited
Bacci, Tina. ““Invention and Drafting in the Digital Age: New Approaches to Thinking about Writing.” The Clearing House, vol. 82, no. 2, 2008, pp. 75-81. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30194804, Accessed 26 June 2019.
Dougherty, Jack. “Co-Writing, Peer Editing, and Publishing in the Cloud.” Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, edited by Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2015, pp. 63–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65sxgk.11.
Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” College Composition and Communication, vol.
28, no. 2, May 1977, pp. 122-128. JSTOR, https://www/jstor.org/stable/356095. Accessed 15 June 2019.
Hairston, Maxine. “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 1, Feb. 1982, pp. 76-88. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/357846. Accessed 16 June 2019.
Harris, Muriel. “Composing Behaviors of One-and-Multi-Draft Writers.” College English, vol. 51, no. 2, Feb. 1989, pp. 174-191. ERIC. Accessed 15 June 2019.
Murray, Donald. “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, 1997, pp. 3-6. ERIC, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED402614.pdf. Accessed 15 June 2019.
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, 1980, pp. 378-388. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/356588. Accessed 15 June 2019.