Section 2: Composing as a Process

Introduction

Seth Graves and Lisa Blankenship

“Writing is a process, not a product,” wrote Pulitzer-winning writing professor Donald Murray in 1972. Writing is a lifelong activity, performed in lots of different spaces, not limited to class essays. And it’s really a process—a messy one at that—of exploring, planning, drafting, and revising. It’s recursive—that is, writers repeat drafting cycles. Yes, generally it results in a product—but writing refers to all of the work that went into getting there.

So, in order to write towards better products, we practice and develop our skills at writing itself. For the past fifty years, scholars in the academic discipline of Rhetoric and Composition have conducted research on the best ways of teaching writing and on how the various and beautifully complicated processes involved with writing actually work. They continue to find that writing not only places what we want to say on the page, but helps us discover and reach new ideas during the act of writing itself.

Viewing and practicing writing as process forms one of our five major course goals and is a major theme of this book beyond just this section. Pieces throughout this collection discuss the complex process of discovering what it is you have to say, especially within the genres of writing you’ll encounter in this course, and organizing how you say it.

Think of this class as an opportunity to become a better writer through the process of writing itself—a process that can help you discover what it is you think, express what may seem inexpressible, and engage more effectively with others in the world.

Work Cited

Murray, Donald. “Teach Writing As a Process Not a Product.” The Leaflet (Nov. 1972), 11–14. Rpt. in Learning by Teaching. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1982: 14–17.