Murray Testimonials

When I think back to my years as an undergraduate and graduate student, I realize that in an important sense I didn't have a writing process. What I did (or didn't) have was luck--luck and rituals and the sense that writing had a force and logic of its own, a force and logic that I couldn't understand, much less employ for my own purposes. At my very best I composed slowly, painfully, revising each sentence as I wrote, spending hours on an introductory paragraph that might well be--and often was--discarded. Because I was willing to spend not just hours but days working on even brief papers, I was generally able to write essays that pleased my instructors. But the cost was high.

Sometime during my first years of teaching it occurred to me that I should do more than study the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the writing process studies that i was beginning to read in the journals--I should learn from them.

And so, influenced by early process research, I began to study myself; I became my own laboratory rat.

I know from my own experience, then, that thinking about and attending to the writing process can help a motivated writer, if not all writers, become more productive and efficient. And as a teacher, I have seen what it can mean to students when they understand, really understand, that writers are made, not born, that writing is not an inherently magical or mysterious activity.

The writing process has had a significant impact upon my won writing and teaching.

My current effort to "read" the writing process movement is grounded, then, in a deep appreciation of the contributions of a number of scholars whose work in the sixties and seventies helped define the initial theoretical and pedagogical projects of our field--scholars like Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, James Britton, Donald Murray, James Moffett, and Janet Emig. I want to acknowledge the achievements of these and other scholars and the impact that this admittedly broad and diverse movement has had on our field. (32-34)

--Lisa Ede, "Reading the Writing Process" Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s.

When I was in graduate school, I'd read CCC (and CE and RTE; they were kind of all that was out there then). The essays would be thick, ponderous, abstruse at times. Then I'd come to Murray. I realized then that it really is possible to convey very complex matters in readable ways. It's guided my career...

--Victor Villuanueva, email exchange, 9/14/11

My story begins in 1983, in Durham, New Hampshire, when I walked into Don Murray's office as a brand new teaching assistant in the M.A. program at the University of New Hampshire. Like so many new T.A.s at UNH, I was struck by Don Murray's openness and the generous way he gave good advice about writing. But I was more taken by what he said about writing. When, at that first TA orientation, Don began to talk about "the writing process," he was describing what I had been doing as a struggling professional writer. And when he and his colleagues criticized the way schools typically taught writing, they were describing my education. It wasn't any sort of epiphany for me to realize that I'd learned to write by writing for a living, not by writing essays in schools. But no one had ever pointed that out in quite the straightforward and convincing way that Don Murray did. And when I began to teach my own composition classes, I found that "process" as an approach to teaching, as a way to think about what writers do, worked. (205)

--Robert P. Yagelski, "Who's Afraid of Subjectivity?" Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s.