Both Donald M. Murray’s essay “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product” and Janet Emig’s piece “Writing as a Mode of Learning” provide the reader with some very useful information about the processes of writing and learning. I found Emig’s essay to be a little hard to comprehend due to what she terms the “off-putting jargon of the learning theorist” (14). In other words, it was a little more difficult for me to understand than Murray’s shorter essay. Regardless, both scholars argue for the reformation of writing education from a product-based evaluation into a process-based one.
Murray opens his piece by pointing out one of the essential flaws in English teaching—“we teach writing as a product, focusing our critical attentions on what our students have done” (3). But he is quick to argue against that pattern and adamantly state that teaching writing is not teaching a product, but rather it is teaching a process—“the process of discovery through language” (4). He argues that during the three main stages of writing—prewriting, writing, and rewriting—the instructor must be very patient, never the “the initiator or the motivator” but rather the “reader, the recipient,” waiting for the student to finish the process in his or her own time and always supporting, but never directing, “this expedition to the student’s own truth” (5). Murray’s idealistic vision of writing comes through in his bold statements such as, “All writing is experimental,” and “Mechanics come last.” He also places great emphasis on the balance that must be kept between the writing process and time. He writes that it must have time to begin and end, to have both “unpressured time” and “pressured time—the deadline.” He elaborates by stating that each student is different and must be allowed to work at their own pace, “within the limits of the course deadlines” (6). The writing process is both outside of time yet within time. Something about this contradiction did not sit well with me.
Janet Emig’s essay expands somewhat on Murray’s argument. The author first lists the major differences between writing and other forms of communication, talking in particular. Talking is natural, writing is learned. Emig then reinstates both the process and product of writing as individual in that it “possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (7), namely that learning profits from reinforcement, seeks self-provided feedback, is connective, and it is active and engaged—self-rhythmed. Writing, likewise, benefits from restructuring and reinforcement, provides immediate feedback in the form of the written word on the page, is a connective process, and is self-rhythmed in that the writing process, like learning, is best done at one’s own pace.
Emig makes a strong case for writing as a valuable tool for learning, and Murray’s argument goes along those same lines, insisting that writing be taught as a process, not a product. Since both of these writings are from the 1970’s, I would presume that both scholars made great contributions in transforming the field of writing from what it was back then to what it is today. But how relevant is it even today to encounter the situation Murray sees in many teachers of “blaming the student” for handing in a poorly-crafted essay, when in fact it is the education system’s fault for instructing the student in the product and not the process. This is evident in my own education; ever since middle school I have oftentimes wrote the literature essay based on what I knew my teachers wanted to see, based on the product they had instructed me to make. Murray calls this cheating “your student of the opportunity to learn the process of discovery” (5). Indeed, too often I’ve been given prompts in my literature courses that confine my thoughts to a narrow space, the professor’s own ideas actually, which I subsequently regurgitated as an A paper, not one thought my own. When was I undergoing the writing process?
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