How do you feel about the step by step writing process?

Answer 1

Finally, a question I can get behind. I would appreciate that this answer remain complete as I submitted it in the interest of fairness and respect. The asker is looking for personal opinion.

The writing process is, in my opinion, a simplistic attempt, and in no small part laziness on the part of some teachers, to get students to write. By breaking it down into reproducible steps, it is believed that students will then be able to produce original writing samples. It is the "teaching a man to fish" method of writing pedagogy. However, it is anything but teaching. It is training, nothing more. The use of the writing process in teaching produces essentially trained chimps. It espouses the five paragraph essay, and usually produces nothing more.

What the writing process does not do is respect the student. Students are people. People communicate. We attempt to communicate nearly from the moment of our birth. The earliest communication is emotive: crying, laughing, etc. Any parent will tell you that the sound of their baby's cry communicates in large part what the problem is; the dirty diaper cry is different from the hungry cry, which is still different from the I want to be held cry. As the development of the child progresses, so too does the development of communication. From noises, burbling and cooing, to one to two word sentences, to steadily more complex verbalization. Eventually, the child begins to communicate in more concrete ways: drawing doodles and shapes, producing recognizable pictures and patterns, to eventually reproducing letters and constructing words. Written language is an extension of the spoken word, a concrete expression. We don't teach the "Speaking Process" when we are teaching infants to communicate verbally. Why then create a totally artificial form of lesson to teach its extension?

In my personal experience, my students made greater strides in developing their writing skills when I gave them examples of my own writing. I gave them the opportunity to see what their teacher did. I gave them, also, the opportunity to see what their fellow students could do. Most importantly, I encouraged them to put words on paper, and I showed appreciation and external validation for every piece of writing my students produced.

I developed a writing exercise that gave them time to put their thoughts down in what ever form those thoughts took. I created a collection of fifty writing prompts for which they produced anything from a single sentence to multiple pages in response. I never graded the content or form of their writing from these prompts, only their participation, and eventually the development of their writing skills as determined by their level of participation. I began with the following as their first writing prompt:The prompt was printed on an overhead slide and was displayed for students as they entered the room. I remained silent in response to any questions; I simply pointed at the screen and the displayed instructions. This was as follows:For the next five minutes, you will answer the following question. Your work will be graded by your level of participation--that is, how you put words on paper--not by the content or appearance of those words. You will remain silent during this exercise and until the five minute time limit has elapsed. The question you must answer is:

How would you answer this question?

Honestly, my students sometimes got frustrated by the exercise. I had one student who wrote his name over and over for two pages. He was stunned when he earned full credit for the effort. He, after all, performed by the literal expectations of the exercise. Many students began by writing, "I don't know how to answer the question because there is no question to answer," or something similar.

As the writing prompts progressed, and the students learned that any response they gave was valid provided it was what they actually thought, they began to perform at higher and higher levels. The fifty-first writing prompt that my students received at the end of the year was the same as the first. Every year I taught, it produced the same effect: at the end of the five minute time limit, students were raising their hands, asking for more time. Five minutes turned in to ten, then twenty, then thirty. The longest time I ever gave for completing that last prompt was the full hour, and several students in that class voluntarily took their work home to complete it.

Was it effective? Very! Of five years of teaching students who took the writing portion of the MEAP, my students improved anywhere from 12% to 35% over the previous year's students. I'm not vain enough to claim that it was solely due to my teaching, but my efforts were an element of their performance.

I know this isn't part of the question, but is the writing process a valid teaching tool? I don't think so. It is a cop-out. It is an easily reproduced lesson, with easily reproduced performance. It is training, not teaching.

We teach writing with the intent of giving students access to a venue for communicating their thoughts, an avenue for showing what they know. The writing process as a pedagogical method does not do this, unless putting a hundred chimps in a room full of typewriters is a valid way to reproduce the beauty of The Bard.