Donald M. Murray’s paper “Teach Writing as Process Not Product” packs a lot of information and advice into a three page paper. Murray lists the three stages of the writing process: prewriting, writing and rewriting. I particularly enjoyed his advice on how to get students to rewrite “by shutting up” (Murray 5). Out of Murray’s ten implications, I found number six, mechanics come last, to be the most useful. Students often fret over minor surface errors when they have yet to construct a coherent paper.
Janet Emig’s essay “Writing as a Mode of Learning” operates under the assumption writing is vital to the learning process, and that “higher cognitive functions, such as analysis and synthesis, seem to develop most fully only with the support system of verbal language – particularly, it seems, of written language.” (Emig 7) Emig uses evidence from numerous fields, ranging from psychology to linguistics, to assert that writing is a vital part of the learning process, one that reinforces knowledge, and helps students to create connections between concepts.
Sondra Perl’s essay “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” analyzes a study of college writers. I believe that this study answered the three questions posed at the beginning, “(1) How do unskilled writers write? (2) Can their writing processes be analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner? And (3) What does an increased understanding of their processes suggest about the nature of composing in general and the manner in which writing is taught in schools?” (Perl 17)
I thought the code that Perl uses was adequate for recording the student’s composition process; however, it took a lot of flipping back and forth for me to decipher what was going on during Tony’s composition session. In regards to the miscue section, I recognized a lot of these mistakes from sessions at the Writing Centers. We encourage students to read their papers out loud in order to spot mistakes, for example, many students will “read in” articles, markers and vocabulary that is missing.
Given the time this was written (1979), what effect would composing on computers have on their research? With the advent of personal computers and word processing programs, revisions can be nearly instant, and in many cases never recorded. On a side note, I would be interested to read about how computers have revolutionized composition and writing in general.
Nancy Sommer’s article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” complements Perl’s essay. One aspect I found insightful was Sommer’s assertion that “the linear model bases itself on speech” (Sommer 44). Sommer goes on to talk about the five parts of a discourse that we studied last week, pointing out that the last two, memoria and pronuntiatio, don’t apply to composition at all.
I thought that some of the student terminology was adorable, “scratch it out and do over again” and “slashing and throwing out” (Sommers 46) were my favorites. However, these terms all give a keen insight as to the revision process of the students. One quote that I found especially interesting was “I throw things out and say they are not good. I like to write like Fitzgerald did by inspiration, and if I feel inspired then I don’t need to slash and throw much out.” (Sommers 46) This reminded me of the composition as an art or a science debate that we went over a few weeks ago.
The segment that talked about students focusing on repetition and vocabulary choice interested me, many of the students (especially ESL) I help at the Writing Center cite this as something they would like to work on. With the use of computers, and Microsoft Word in particular, this sometimes has a humorous result. ESL students will use the thesaurus and pick the biggest, most intelligent sounding word, not realizing that it either doesn’t apply, or that it is ridiculously archaic.
According to Sommer and the quotes from experienced writer that she has collected, experienced writers focus less on local issues, such as vocabulary, and more on global issues, including organization and audience.
Although they may be more difficult to read than our other assigned articles, I like the scientific research papers we read in this class. Maybe I am reverting back to the late 19th century viewpoint that “valuable” fields have quantifiable data, but I still like seeing data backed up by numbers and graphs.
I found the results of Hillocks meta-analysis to be extremely telling. The fact that the study of grammar “has no effect on raiding the quality of student writing” (Hillocks 160) is profound in its implications. For most of my primary and secondary education, grammar was heavily featured in my English classes. Hillocks advise that “[t]eachers concerned with teaching standard usage and typographical conventions should teach them in the context of real writing problems” (Hillocks 160), and I would have to agree. Out of all the methods investigated by Hillocks, sentence combining and inquiry seem to be the most useful and easily integrated into teaching curriculum.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This is a good response. As your writing center experience confirms, these articles, which ranged in methodology/approach, all seem to confirm that novice writers focus too much on mechanics, which inhibits their writing. Murray underscores a key point that a writing classroom should be mostly about writing. (Remember that when you get a chance to teach writing.) Hillocks' metaanalysis confirms this, but also suggests that a writing teacher needs to introduce some principles like rhetoric/audience, etc. to help students develop into more competent writers. That is the difference between the unstructored "natural process" classroom and the more structured, yet student-centered "environmenal" classroom. As the studies of student writers showed (and your own more recent experiences attest to), we're still being haunted by the current-traditional era's emphasis on mechanics down to the steretotypes and baggage that inhibit indivdiual writers.
As for the role of computers on the composing process, yes, there have been some studies done. We'll read a few in the upcoming "computers and writing" unit. Most of it was in the 1980s, however, and computers have changed a lot since then. The field's focus shifted away from process, however, and only a few (like Slattery, whom we'll read) are looking at process with a fresh, technology-informed perspective. This is another needed area of research...
Post a Comment