Reading the Writing Process

Criticisms:

• Most process theory did not, however, acknowledge the extent to which both its methods and its conclusions depended upon the reduction of students, in all their diversity, into a construct called the student writer, and of writing, with its rich multiplicity, into student writing. (35)
• Similarly, process theory did both students and teachers a great service by challenging rigid and formalistic stage-model pedagogies. But the concept of "process" governing its own theory and practice was seldom scrutinized. Recent arguments about cognitive-based research in general, and protocol studies in particular, have reminded use of the potentially mechanistic, and even industrial, connotations of this term. To the extent that this mechanistic conception of process has literally and metaphorically informed both the teaching of and research on writing, it has inevitably oversimplified and distorted a phenomenon whose richness and complexity we have yet adequately to acknowledge. (35)
• ...any consideration of the role that the writing process movement has played in effecting institutional change must also acknowledge the ease with which these changes not only can be but at times have been cooped and commodified--by textbooks that oversimplified and rigidified a complex phenomenon, by overzealous language arts coordinators and writing program administrators who assumed that the process approach to teaching could be "taught" in one or two in-service sessions, by all those who (myself included) forgot that the very term "writing process movement" refers not to a concrete material reality but to an idealogically-charged construct. (35-36)
• We need to at least acknowledge the possibility, then, that in an important sense the writing process movement has existed more strongly in the discursive practice that we call theory than in the theoretical enactments that take place daily in our classrooms. (36)

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I have just argued that research on writing as process and as social process share central epistemological assumptions about knowledge and its relationship to practice. These two movements also have relied, I believe, upon similar foundational principles and strategies. Each, for instance, in effect constituted itself through a denial of origins that involves creating that which it wishes to oppose and then erasing the shared ground that made the original construction of the other possible. In an important sense current-traditional rhetoric did not exist until advocates of writing as a process created it; similarly, the writing as a social process movement can exist only in opposition to--and thus in dependence upon--a consolidated and reified writing as a process movement. (37)

Generally, this piece feels like an argument for balance. Two things:

1. Less revolutionary rhetoric.

2. Less divisiveness.