Teaching Writing as Process

'Teach Writing as a Process Not Product,' Murray's 1972 essay, helped launch the process movement in composition studies. The claim was structural: if writing is thinking, then teaching writing is teaching thinking, and the teacher's job is not to evaluate the product but to support the process. The process moves through stages — prewriting, drafting, revising — but the stages are not linear; they are recursive. The writer moves forward and backward, collecting and focusing and ordering and developing, each stage feeding the others in a cycle that does not end until the writer decides (or the deadline insists) that the piece is done. Process pedagogy requires small classes, individual attention, writing conferences, and institutional patience with messiness — all of which most educational systems cannot easily provide.