Questions I'm Asking about the Murray Project

1. How do we view/understand/locate/situate Donald Murray?
2. How should we?
3. How did his life inform his work/views?

I'm thinking about important works in composition in the early years and how they contributed to our field's ethos and orientation. I've just stumbled upon this passage in Rose:

English A students vex universities like UCLA. By the various criteria the institutions use, the students deserve admission--have earned their way--but they are considered marginal, "high risk" or "at risk" in current administrative parlance. "The truly illiterate among us," was how one dean described them.

Dr. Gunner is a particularly gifted teacher of English A. She refuses to see her students as marginal... (Rose 2)

This notion of "refusing to see students as marginal" interests me and I think that Murray and others gave us this orientation, as a field. So, who else?

Mina Shaughnessy

Janet Emig

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I'm reading "Internal Revision" and I am struck by the fact that what Don was, perhaps, most interested in, was the process of discovery that comes in writing. He points out that no one talks about it or teaches it, but that it is when writing is most interesting (or at least to him). In another article he has this great line about being interested in both writer and reader-based prose and too often teaching the importance of reader-based prose when what he usually finds more interesting is writer-based prose.

Discovery of meaning through language--that nicely sums up Don's fascination.