Different Products, Different Processes: A Theory about Writing

Autor: Maxine Hairston
Rok vydání: 1986
Předmět:
Zdroj: College Composition and Communication. 37:442
ISSN: 0010-096X
DOI: 10.2307/357914
Popis: Most people who have been working in composition theory in the past ten years would probably agree that the major change that has come about in the profession in that time is exemplified by the maxim, "Focus on the writing process, not on the written product." It is part of the new conventional wisdom of the profession, and certainly for most of us a welcome change from an approach to teaching writing that depended primarily on analysis and imitation of the written product. I want to suggest, however, that following our new maxim is not nearly as easy as one might think; nonfiction prose is not all alike and different kinds of writing are not done in the same way. In other words, "the process of writing" should not be taken to mean the same thing as "the writing process." Almost certainly, there is more than one. It's been evident in the profession for some time that major researchers and teachers in the field cannot agree on what the writing process is or should be. Those teachers who belong to what Lester Faigley and others call the "literary" or "romantic" school of writing-for example, Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, and William Coles-believe that students are most likely to learn how to express what they know and feel if the teacher focuses primarily on finding ways to stimulate the students' inherent ability and need to write. (See Lester Faigley, Roger D. Cherry, David A. Jolliffe, and Anna R. Skinner, Assessing Writers' Knowledge and Processes of Composing [Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Co., 19851, Chapter 1.) They think that writers discover their meaning by writing, and that, for the most part, they cannot know what to write nor how to write it until they actually begin to write something. They would say that students do not really learn how to write; rather they come to an understanding of what it means to write by actually engaging in the process. This school of teachers has little use for strategies or formulas or for the Aristotelian approach that would divide the writing process into stages of discovery, arrangement, and style.
Databáze: OpenAIRE