According to Thomas Devine, the writing process is misguided. In "Caveat Emptor: The Writing Process Approach to College Writing," in the September 1990 issue of the Journal of Developmental Education, Devine writes,"Today college teachers concerned with student writing can find a super-abundance of information--almost all, unfortunately, from the writing process point of view" (p. 2). He means you, Lucy Calkins, Donald Graves, and Donald Murray.
Devine makes five assertions:
1. Not all writers follow The Process--brainstorm, draft, revise, peer review, edit, publish.
2. Beliefs about the writing process, such as writing as discovery, meaning-making, and form following function, are questionable.
3. The process approach produces non-academic writing.
4. It's good for writers to emulate the models of other great writers.
5. There is no evidence (as of 1990) that the process approach produces better writing.
As a process teacher, I took issue with many of Devine's claims. True, not all writers, including the professional writers Devine cites, follow the same writing process. However, as Rita Pollard points out in "Another Look: The Process Approach to Composition Instruction" in the same issue of the journal, most teachers view the writing process as an iterative process, and those who present it as a rigid, lock-step structure are misguided in their application.
I think Devine is out of touch with the readers of the Journal of Developmental Education when he writes, "To deliberately encourage young writers to produce casual journalistic prose in their college courses may be doing them a disservice" (p. 3). He elaborates by saying students who pursue careers in law, medicine, and business "will not thank us for teaching them the print equivalent of social conversation (p. 3). Here Devine is referring to the use of contractions and the first-person perspective.
The primary audience for the Journal of Developmental Education is community college instructors. Given this audience and the mission of community colleges to advance technical education, I don't think Devine, a university professor, knows who community college students are. When I taught at a community college, my developmental English courses were filled with future Blackjack dealers, chefs, and mechanics. I'm not implying that students in developmental English are incapable of achieving professional careers, but for a developmental student, preparation for graduate study should not be a concern in the first semester or course work. Plus, Poland tells us research on nonacademic writing shows there are "few 'real world' corollaries for the kinds of 'academic' writing we require of college students" (p. 32), so we're still doing our students, gradaute school bound or not, a disservice.
Returning to the issue of audience, Devine advocates modeling of professional writers such as the way Benjamin Franklin emulated the style of Joseph Addison. Sure, students could sit around modeling Thoreau if they were going to become philosophers, or write like D. H. Lawrence if they wanted to be authors, but these are not the goals of most developmental English students. Devine suggests students should use the best writing in their respective fields as models, but he is forgetting that many developmental writers are also developmental readers. Reading text at this level would be confusing and intimidating to developmental students who struggle to write at the sentence level.
I think the Journal of Developmental Education made a wise decision in balancing Devine's claims with Pollard's response. As Pollard points out at the end of her article, it's important to challenge widely held assumptions, but this must be done in an academically rigorous way.
I found your post very enlightening as I am continuing to learn more about preservice' teachers writing instruction and preparation for K-12 classroom teaching. The five main points made by Devine are worthy of discussion and may not be relevant for all readers.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, not every writer completes all stages of the writing process, some of my novice intermediate writers, needed the structure that the writing process provided. Once some confidence was gained as a writer, the steps did not seem so important. However, the writing process did advocate the process of writing over the product. During discussions, I would often ask students which stage of the writing process did they consider most important. Inevitably, most would respond with the publishing step, or writing the final draft. At that point in time, the students were extremely product driven. However, they soon came to realize that generating ideas through prewriting was equally important. The students, though, needed options and the freedom to complete this stage. Prescribed webs and graphic organizers did little to generate ideas and provide support.
That is why I am studying the use of writing circles, which can serve as a companion to the traditional writing workshop and classroom instruction. Involving students, regardless of age or level, can be the key to creating the next generation of student and teacher writers.