Studying One's Own Writing Process

Literacy narrative...

I'm struck by this realization... In Cross-Talk, Villenueva writes:

In the mid- and late-1960s, as some researchers began to conduct research on composing, Murray, Macrorie, and Elbow, Villenueva writes, “turned to what they knew as writers and as teachers to shed light on what writers do when they write” (2).

What writers do when they write--these men studied their own writing processes to see what they could learn and then offered this wisdom to the rest of us. And in a way, this is what many of us do today--we ask students to reflect on their writing processes. In WAW, we do this most explicitly when we ask students to write autoethnographies or literacy narratives--two popular assignments in writing courses. These assignments are the legacy of Murray. Murray and others made it okay, gave us the ability to imagine that one's writing process could be the object of study--in fact, should be an object of study. I think that this is one of the things we want students to take away from a writing class--greater insight into their own writing processes. Murray and others pointed the way here by studying their own processes and sharing what they learned. There is value in this and this is a point worth making at some point when I get down to trying to nail down Murray's significance. Our literacy narrative and auto ethnography assignments for example, are the descendants of Murray's own investigations into his process.