Teaching the Writing Process "According to most contemporary theorists,
'teaching' writing means involving oneself in
or guiding students' writing processes."
-Bedford Guide to Writing in the Disciplines 3
Certainly, non-WIP faculty who use writing in traditional ways in their courses -- "assigning and evaluating but not teaching writing, [emphasis ours] -- perform an important role in the academy," for by requiring writing, they show its "centrality to academic life" (Bedford 8).
However, writing intensive instruction goes further. In addition to an awareness that students learn to write "when they learn to write meaningfully for a specific audience," context, or discipline, the WIP adds to traditional approaches a process philosophy: we emphasize that teaching writing in the disciplines means teaching the writing process and its processes.
Writing as process rather than event
On the value of "process," writing program scholars like to quote writer William Stafford, who observes, in language that reflects the recursive nature of heuristic processes, that "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them" (Writing the Australian Crawl 1982). Put simply, writing, in any discipline, is learning a process by which to write. Representing that process in writing, with clearly identifiable phases that serve as prompts for direction, helps students who tend to believe in the " fantasy of instant text production," whereby, in the words of Patricia Bizzell, writing is produced "as easily and as inevitably as a hen lays eggs" ("Composing Processes" 49).
While few students (or faculty for that matter) in the disciplines consider themselves "writers" in the literary sense that much writing advice often connotes, Stafford's comment above goes to the center of what writing intensive courses can do for students: define and elaborate the writing process in disciplinary contexts and engage students in it. After all, our definition of "writing intensive" is "providing students with a more intense engagement with the writing process and its processes in the disciplines," not assigning an overwhelming amount of writing. The message to get across to students, a fairly recent revelation even for writing teachers, is that one does not become competent with writing tasks because he or she is struck by the Muse, obtains a miracle, resorts to magic, or is simply gifted, but because one practices and adopts a process -- a way of developing and presenting information -- and receives guidance and feedback along the way.
As we have emphasized, writing intensive courses, which involve students in staged and sequenced assignments, provide students with a process for writing and engage students in it. As the Bedford makes clear, offering another benefit of writing intensive instruction, engaging in the writing process itself is valuable: "simply going through the process . . . helps students become more effective writers" (5).
Elaborating the writing process in the disciplines
In its general sense, the writing process includes loosely sequential and recursive phases of
1) Planning and Preparation (often called Prewriting)
2) Drafting
3) Revising
4) Editing and Proofing.
Though successful writing results from successful planning and revising -- which entail thoughtful engagement with the writing process -- students think successful writing results from changing words around like puzzle pieces and fixing errors like comma splices. Simply helping them to adapt and use a process for writing -- and encouraging them to revise their thinking -- amounts to a giving them a revelation.
The writing process and processesWhile the relatively recent rebooting of writing as a process has amounted to a paradigmatic shift in how writing instructors and other scholars think about and teach writing, the trend has been for writing process scholars to recognize that "multiple writing processes" enter into the overall process of writing and, moreover, that these various processes vary from student to student and context to context (Bedford 45). In addition to explaining the overall process of writing -- "how one comes up with ideas, organizes them in written prose, and then reconsiders and revises them" --- the task for faculty is to describe and elaborate the sub-processes that figure into the assignments we require. The term "process" refers to the overall process and also to each recursive phase of doing a writing task, so that Planning, Drafting, Revising, and Editing/Proofing are each processes themselves. "Writing processes" also include specific processes at work in these phases, for instance, the processes involved in problem discovery, planning, outlining, defining, analyzing, comparing, synthesizing, evaluating, and communicating to larger audiences. Increasingly, scholars have recognized that in order to help students write in the disciplines, we have to tell students what these processes entail and what formats they suggest. We have to tell them what a literature review, a case study, a lab report, or an analysis entails in a disciplinary context. "The word 'analyze,'" for instance, " might mean summarize, compare, contrast, take apart, reassemble, or regurgitate -- in short, different things to different students," and it may also mean different things in different disciplines (Toby Fulwiler, "Teaching with Writing" 117-118).
While not always terming it as "the writing process," every discipline has a process by which it generates and communicates discovery and information, whether the process is the scientific method, the problem solving process, or a version of the insight process. Sometimes, because this process is so deeply ingrained in a discipline, it is not formally articulated, though in other disciplines, the sciences, for example, it may be an explicit part of domain knowledge.
It may be important to point out to students that the writing process does not replace the problem solving process, in disciplines such as math, for example, but provides another metaphor for it. Teaching the writing process in context can help students develop and present knowledge in any discipline because engaging the writing process teaches metacognitive skills, such as goal setting, monitoring progress, assessing efforts, and developing and revising strategies, that are essential to higher-order thought. The "process note" is an assignment aimed to foster students' metacognition about their writing processes.
More attention to planning and more opportunities to revise
Finally, WIP emphasis on a process model for writing holds that students need more guidance and feedback in planning and revising stages, including opportunities for revision, than is usually possible in traditional classes. As all of us know, many students start the writing process in the drafting stage, and what they turn in is often a first draft. Even more troublesome, they think that revising is simply changing some of the words in a paper or fixing grammatical mistakes, rather than engaging in the process of drafting and then "re-seeing," with feedback over time, that is essential to revision.
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