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The 112 Writing Process
The Writer’s Notebook
Most published writers report that they write daily, or at least very often, frequently producing pages and pages of material that will never go further than their notebooks or be read by anyone else. Although it’s difficult to mirror such practice in a classroom, we want to emphasize the central role that low-stakes (i.e., ungraded, private, experimental) writing plays in a working writer’s process. In College Writing we encourage students to do most of their generative writing (i.e., the first step in our five-step process) and journal writing (i.e., private writing) in a “notebook” in order to provide a space for the kinds of continual, open writing that writers see as central to generating their thinking and experimenting with their style. The notebook provides a single space where writers can continually return for new ideas and reminders of the material they had hoped to include while drafting.
The Drafting Cycle
We require that the students take most essays they write through a five-step process. As stated in the course syllabus, one of our central aims is to teach our students a longer and more thoughtful writing process. However, this five-step process does more than that: it makes visible to the students the writing process that most writers go through. In a sense we are unfolding a process that has already been compressed for them. By asking our students to take a paper through this process, we slow down the writing process so they can see and experience the steps that go into writing an essay or any piece of writing. Each “step” we require of our students highlights and focuses on one particular aspect of the writing process. However, it is important to note that despite the linear, step-by-step way the curriculum moves students through this process, most writers move back and forth among these steps constantly, sometimes generating more material after drafting; returning to generating after revising, and so on. Thus, modeling for students the recursive way these steps cycle through one another and back again can make this process seem less “lock step” and more in line with how writers actually produce text.
Generating
This step does not look to generate a draft, if a draft is considered an actual working-out of the essay from start to finish. Instead, at this stage, students work on generating material they might work with in the essay, often producing many short pieces of writing that explore multiple topics to help them choose the eventual focus of their essay. We refer to this as “generative writing” to reflect the thought process involved: when the writer generates ideas, considers multiple options for topics, invents material that might be useful for the later essay, and rethinks positions and perspectives—reinventing his or her own take on the issue. In almost all cases, this will involve writing more than the writer will actually use in an essay.
Drafting
This is the stage of writing most of our students would call the first draft: their first full length writing in the form their essay might take. Many writers, however, would include many drafts at this stage; thus, we need to caution students about struggling to get this draft “right the first time.” As teachers we sometimes see this as a resistance to revision. However, the majority of our students have come to believe (through their own educational experience and how writing is generally viewed) that good writers get it right the first time. In the drafting stage, then, we as teachers need to work at dispelling this myth by focusing on the revision aspect of the writing process. At the initial drafting stage, we encourage students to pay particular attention to clarifying their thoughts, focusing their topic, and developing their ideas. As a result, these drafts are typically “writer-centered,” giving students a chance to experiment with their ideas in ways that make sense to them.
Also, although time does not always allow for it, there may be more than one “version” created during the drafting process. Students might have a variety of ways of beginning their essay, ranging from fleshed-out first drafts to extended outlines or even skeletons. Be sure to specify to your students what you expect at the drafting stage and warn them that this draft might be reworked more than once.
Revising
In this stage we highlight the importance of context and audience, using feedback to help students re-see their work from the perspective of their readers. Through response groups, our own feedback, and various in-class activities, we work at enabling the students to re-see their drafts in new and/or different ways. We ask them to do substantial revisions that require them to re-think, re-conceptualize, and re-organize their essay. The result of these “re-seeings” is the “revision draft.”
Copy-Editing
The last draft produced focuses on proofreading and copy-editing. By separating out this step, we enable the students to develop and hone their editing skills, and to focus on issues such as grammar and mechanics when they are most relevant: after the text is largely produced and will no longer undergo substantial changes. In the initial units, students will be asked to work on this step in class; in later units, copy-editing will still occur after the revision draft is produced, but may happen outside of class time.
Reflecting
Throughout the process (usually in between “stages”), students reflect in writing on the work they’ve done to help make more apparent why they’ve chosen to write and revise the way they did. Such reflection occurs after generative writing exercises, when students might reflect on which topic they will choose to develop and why; after response groups, when they might reflect on which pieces of feedback they will apply and which they will ignore; during revision, when they might reflect on why they chose to make certain changes; after copy-editing, when they might self-assess the piece in terms of how it meets their purpose and audience. In short, reflection occurs often in the process and is designed to help give you (the teacher) insight into the rhetorical choices your student writers are making and to help students begin to develop a language for self-assessing their own writing.
A sixth step in the writing process, publication, is treated separately below. It is highlighted at least once in the semester.
Peer Response
The overall goal of the drafting cycle is to help students improve their writing. Students begin with generative writing, and, through a series of drafts, they work to further develop the meaning of their texts. To revise, students need to be able to “re-see” their drafts in order to examine and re-imagine the rhetorical choices that will further complicate and deepen the meaning of their texts as well as to strengthen the connection among their audience, purpose, and context.
Response and revision work together in order to enable students to examine their drafts, develop new strategies, and articulate their choices. Revision could not work (and does not work) without continual response from readers and reflection upon one’s own writing. They are, in a sense, the two additional elements of any revision/drafting cycle which cannot be described linearly. Instead, reflection and response—from teachers, from peers, from self—occurs at every stage in the process. Each draft of a paper receives at least one peer and one teacher response, while generative writing and additional drafts receive continual informal responses. Reflective writing occurs throughout the process.
While we will discuss written modes of teacher response at Orientation and in your Course Director groups, you will not (nor should you) be the only responder in class. Rather, fellow classmates and, in fact, the writer should be continually engaged in the responding process.
Response Groups
The use of response groups is a key practice in all Writing Program courses. It is through this process of students responding to one another’s writing that they become careful readers and analysts of writing, learn terminology to discuss writing, and recognize that some of the strategies they suggest to their peers can be employed to improve their own texts. Response is also the primary impetus that inspires students to revise; learning how to make meaningful global revisions to their texts is another primary goal in our courses. While it is tempting for teachers to “cut to the chase” and insert their own more polished and pointed critiques of students’ writing, patience in training students to become thoughtful and dedicated responders to one another will have a longer-term payoff. While students have access to their writing instructor’s comments for one semester, they will have access to a trained response community well beyond their writing course. Indeed, it is as much your responsibility to teach students how to respond meaningfully to their own and others’ writing as it is to teach them the elements of effective prose.
As students work through each stage of the writing process, peer response can be productive and useful. There are many different ways to respond to writing. It might be helpful to think of the different types of feedback as ranging along a continuum from sharing with no feedback to criterion-based feedback. As the students work their way through each step of the revision process, different types of response are more productive than others. When planning for your response groups, it is helpful to consider what might be the most useful type of response the student/writer needs to hear at that particular stage in the revision process. Generally we ask our students to share almost all their writing—from generative activities to copy-editing—with their peers for some kind of feedback. The following is a general guide to the types of feedback that writers find productive during each step of the drafting process.
In the very early stages (e.g., generating), it is helpful for students to share and discuss ideas. For early drafts, it is useful to move the feedback up a level by asking peers to engage in activities that enable students to hear what they are saying in their texts. During the time between the initial drafting and the production of a revision draft, more focused feedback or activities are generally more productive to enable students to explore and examine other rhetorical strategies, with the copy-editing draft providing the occasion to focus on issues of grammar and usage.
Specific classroom approaches to response groups may differ. For instance, the size of the peer response groups can vary, although groups of three or four (instead of pairs) have the advantage of offering a writer more than one response. Most teachers ask students to begin by reading their drafts aloud so that they have the advantage of “hearing” their texts. Then the listeners/readers respond—sometimes orally, sometimes in writing, sometimes both. Some form of written response, however, can be very useful so that writers have a record to refer to later.
Written responses might take the form of the writer taking notes during oral response, writing a reflection letter, or a more extensive form of written feedback produced by the reader. As the groups move to more criterion-based responding, silent reading and written responses are usually most effective. How to conduct response groups will be a constant topic of discussion within your CD meetings. As most of us have found, teaching students to become effective responders is an ongoing process. The Resource Center staff, as well as the Writing Program staff, can also provide you with a variety of valuable activities and exercises to enable students to become effective responders.
Publication and Circulation
In College Writing, the students’ own writing, rather than the writing of established authors or professional writers, is the focus of the course. That doesn’t mean, however, that writing in this course is merely “academic.” After all, many students come to college accustomed to viewing writing as primarily a school-sponsored activity, an exercise whose main purpose is to meet the requirements of an assignment or to demonstrate skills to a teacher-evaluator. What this course is meant to sponsor, instead, is writing for genuine inquiry, meaning-making, and social interaction. In fact, a major goal of this course is to encourage students to see themselves as having important things to say to real audiences they hope to actually affect. Therefore, publication and circulation of student texts are central parts of College Writing.
By its very nature, writing always circulates, always takes on a life of its own. Even the most “personal” writing, read by no one but the writer, can engage the self in highly rhetorical ways and function as a kind of intrapersonal communication. In the classroom, similarly, student writing often circulates among students in surprisingly powerful and unpredictable ways. Certainly, all developing writers need time, space, and support to generate ideas, experiment with forms, try out arguments, and practice new habits; but they also need to see how their writing, even in draft form, is read for meaning and effect by actual readers. For this reason, College Writing is structured to facilitate writing for a variety of audiences: fellow class members, other scholars, publics of various kinds. Students need to be aware as well that their texts will often circulate beyond their intended audiences and be read in ways they did not foresee. One part of revision, in fact, is considering how texts might be rewritten to circulate in different networks than the ones originally intended.
Publication, meanwhile, can be seen as a more final and intentional activity. Although writing often circulates beyond the control and intentions of the writer, writers do have some agency in publication. And by “publication,” we do not mean only mass reproduction. Publication can be any way that we “make public” our texts, even if they never reach multitudes of readers. Publishing final versions of students’ writing validates them as writers and also helps convey to them a sense of the communicative purpose of writing. And by publishing students’ texts as essays to be read, just like essays in a magazine or book, we hope to heighten students’ sense of themselves as real writers with real audiences interested in their ideas. Publication to the class as a whole also puts positive pressure on students to write as well as they can, attending not only to what they say but also to how they present themselves.
The Writing Program requires, therefore, that all College Writing classes publish at least one class magazine per semester. These magazines can be used in various ways. Most obviously, they can serve as collections of actual texts to be read and responded to. They can also be used to support discussions about writing itself, including such rhetorical features as organization and voice. And they can be used as sources of ideas or information in particular units and thus could include generative writing or early drafts in addition to or rather than finished products. Many teachers publish their class magazine towards the end of the semester as part of the TBA unit. But the class magazine could be done earlier in the semester as well; in fact, “magazines” could be published for each unit. Instructors can experiment with different forms of circulation and publication, perhaps circulating Unit I essays in print so students can discuss their texts as a group or “publishing” short response drafts in Unit II so students can practice quoting each other in their “Interacting with Texts” essays, or having students plan “real” publication venues for their Unit III essays, imagining how they might literally “add to a conversation.”
Members of your Course Director group as well as the Resource Center staff can provide other helpful suggestions for circulating and publishing your students’ texts, helping them become more aware of the power of circulation and publication, and helping you make your students’ writing the center of your course. Special project money from the Writing Program is available to create more polished or innovative forms of publication.
Next section: Evaluation of Student Performance: Grading
