Writing process

A writing process is a series of actions that writers take in the course of producing a text that satisfies their purposes and the expectations of their readers (if any). It is a key term in the teaching of writing. A writing process is a series of actions that writers take in the course of producing a text that satisfies their purposes and the expectations of their readers (if any). It is a key term in the teaching of writing. 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 'prewriting, writing, and rewriting'. Though Murray was not alone in advocating process-based instruction, this manifesto is regarded as a landmark articulation of the differences between process and product orientations in the teaching of writing. Within a decade, Maxine Hairston was to observe that the teaching of writing had undergone a 'paradigm shift' in moving from a focus on written products to writing processes. The writing process has typically been divided into phases of prewriting, writing, and revising. Prewriting was defined by Project English experimental researcher D. Gordon Rohman as the 'sort of 'thinking' 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.' More contemporary research on writing processes suggests it inaccurate to describe these 'stages' as fixed steps in a linear process. While accepting as a given that some kind of process is necessarily involved in producing any written text, contemporary studies endorse '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.' Rather, they are overlapping parts of a complex whole or parts of a recursive process that are repeated multiple times throughout the writing process. For example, writers routinely discover that, for instance, editorial changes trigger brainstorming and a change of purpose; that drafting is temporarily interrupted to correct a misspelling; or that the boundary between prewriting and drafting is less than obvious. Writing process has been described by composition scholars in a variety of ways with attention to 'developmental, expressive, and social' elements. Flower and Hayes extend Bitzer's rhetorical situation to become a series of rhetorical problems, i.e., when a writer must represent the situation as a problem to be solved, such as the invocation of a particular audience to an oversimplified approach such as finding a theme and completing the writing in two pages by Monday's class.