A Writer Teaches Writing

Notes on 1968 edition (5/12/17)

Notes

Preface

A Writer Teaches Writing gives English teachers an effective method of teaching composition based on the experience of professional writers. The book, tested by teachers in hundreds of classrooms, shows how the skills of the publishing writer can be learned by the student. The ability to write is not a gift, it is a skill. A Writer Teaches Writing shows the teacher how to help the student develop the ability to write—in school on an essay test, a term paper, an examination, a book report; beyond school in a business letter, a scholarly paper, an engineering report, a news release, a corporate memo, a poem—whatever is appropriate to the students individual ability and need. This method does NOT train students to be professional writers but it does encourage students to teach themselves the lessons professional writers have taught themselves.

1. an effective method

2. “based on the experience of professional writers” & “shows how the skills of the publishing writer can be learned by the student”

3. “The ability to write is not a gift, it is a skill.”

4. There is a method that can applied in many circumstances and for many different genres

5. allow the students to teach themselves as pros do (i.e. school and teachers, not necessary)

He had isolated and defined the steps followed by most effective writers—businessmen and poets, scientists and journalists—and then made his students experience the process of writing as followed by most professionals.

The author met with eighteen experienced secondary school teachers…

During the winter of 1967-68 NESDEC and the Reader’s Digest Educational Division sponsored a project through which the ideas in this book were tried in eight elementary schools..

This book is also an indirect product of the author’s own teachers of writing—Mortimer B. Howell of Tilton, New Hampshire, the late Carroll Towle of the University of New Hampshire and Gerald Warner Brace of Boston University.

I am particularly indebted to my students who have taught me while I have attempted to teach them.

How does the writer write?

            We must be able to answer this question to teach writing effectively. But we cannot discover how the writer works merely by studying what he has left on the page. We must observe the act of writing itself to expose to our students the process of writing as it is performed by the successful writer.

            The successful writer is the person who conveys information, ideas and experience across the barriers of time and distance. The writer may be a novelist, a salesman, a lawyer, a historican, a member of the League of Women Voters, an engineer, a journalist, a general, a philosopher, a politician, an advertising copywriter, a union official, a businessman, a scientist. Those categories simply identify the material he has to communicate, they do not indicate whether he is a writer or not. The man who creates an effective memo is as much a writer as the man who produces an effective sonnet. We should isolate and identify the fundamental skills of the writer, who is able to take an idea from his brain and transplant it into the minds of people beyond the range of his voice. (1)

It is the job of the writing teacher to create a climate in which his students can experience the act of writing as it is performed by the professional writer. (1)

Writing is exploration—discovery of meaning, discovery of form—and the writer works back and forth, concentrating on one of the writer’s seven basic skills at a time, so that he can discover what he has to say and how to say it more efficiently. (1)

…there is a consistent pattern of work which can be identified and passed on to the student writer. (1)

The student writer and his teacher, however, must first understand what every writer knows: there are no absolute laws of composition. Each principle of writing may be broken to solve a particular problem in a specific piece of work. The only test a writer applies to a page is the craftman’s question, “Does it work?” But in making language […] most writers discover they have to practice, consciously or unconsciously, the following seven skills.

(the following was written earlier, perhaps the 4/4/13 publish on date)

Notes...

• This is a book aimed at teachers of writing (Don wrote some books aimed at teachers and others aimed at writers--but in the details of what he says and in practice, separating these two audiences out might not be so simple)
• There is a good deal of autobiography in this book.
• I get exhausted with Don's efforts to create a "model" of the writing process...headings and sub-headings leading into more headings and sub-headings... All for what?
• Awareness of the historical moment (1984) of publication--his acknowledgment that there is no one process, the contingency of his "model," his recognition of the evolving nature of the field.

I find myself more and more thinking about the opportunities for personal, psychological, emotional, intellectual development that Murrayesque pedagogies made available to me and wanting to argue for that. Who cares about whether what I was getting was going to help me in some future situation, the bottom line is that it was helping me or perhaps, more important, meaningful to me, RIGHT THEN. What obligation do I feel towards my own students in this direction?

PREFACE

(this is a wonderful story and there is much personal info/data here about Murray and the book worth revisiting)

...a manuscript I delivered with secret pride and public apprehension 36 years ago is now considered a historical document. (xi)

If not a product of that time, it was the climate of the Sixties that allowed its publication and acceptance. (xi)

The 1984 edition of A Writer Teaches Writing was still in some ways an evangelical book and it was still radical to many in the educational establishment. (xii)

To me, however, A Writer Teaching Writing will always bean autobiographical document, the narrative of one writer who attempted to become a teacher of writing in mid-life. (xii)

CHAPTER 1: LEARNING TO ALLOW LEARNING

One great thing about this chapter is the way that Don lays out his "Assumptions" right up front. He has five of them (a nice round number):

• Writing is thinking.
• Writing is a process.
• Effective teaching is responsive.
• Writing is an interaction of the global and the particular.
• There is no one way.

CHAPTER 2: CULTIVATING SURPRISE: THE PROCESS THEORY OF WRITING

He begins laying out his model...an endless downward spiral towards something that can never really be mapped, I don't think. Too many variable.

It occurs to me while I read this that there is an endless number of sub-heading levels...it's too much. Too much information. Information overload. But there are nuggets of wisdom and there are good strategies here. Perhaps better CONSULTED than READ.

CHAPTER 3: DRAFTING, REVISING, AND EDITING

All writing is an act of faith, belief in self, belief in the subject, belief in its form, belief in its voice. Teachers--and editors--must recognize how hard it is to maintain faith--and how essential. (41)

There is a time for criticism and high standards, but at the moment of beginning a draft, every writer needs faith. Avoidance is real. (41).

Writers are subversives. They know the best writing often works by implication, not impressing the reader with the thinking the writer has done but--through the crafty implantation of information--forcing the reader to think what the writer wants the reader to think. (53)

Students should be reminded to utilize the whole spectrum of documentation...when they are writing, choosing the form that is most appropriate for the point being made and the reader who needs to understand it. (55)

...I found my eye glancing more and more at what came before, not after, the first draft. In addition I noticed that more and more scholars were doing stimulating research into revision but that relatively little research concerned prewriting. That's one of the delights of an academic life. You can follow your own curiosity, attempting to answer your own questions in your own way... (56)

At first the writer pays attention to the global concerns of subject and truth and point of view and organization, but as the larger problems are solved, the writer moves in close, paying attention to detail, picking every nit so that nothing will get between the reader and the subject. This parallels an increasing attention to audience. In the early drafts, the writer is his or her own reader, but art he draft evolves, the writer stands back to see how it will communicate to a reader. (57)

There is a section on p. 73 of this book that's interesting, called "Adapting the Process to New Writing Tasks" which may shed light on Murray's evolving orientation towards "the writing process"--in it, he acknowledges that there is no one process. It seems that he has shifted towards a kind of relativism. There is no process--there are many processes which depend on the writer (he uses the phrase "cognitive style") and the nature of the writing task. Here's the lead in:

Remember that there is not one writing process, but many. I have described a process of writing in this book, because that is the only coherent way to introduce and demonstrate the concept of process. It should not ever be seen as gospel. It is only a working model that can be examined, changed, or discarded (73).

CHAPTER 4: THE FIRST HOUR OF THE DAY

Just Random Observations:

One of the things I love about Don's writing is the way you stumble into passages which almost perfectly capture something you've experienced about writing. These serve as validation or recognition, of a sort. Here's one:

The writing process is organic. It grows and changes during the act of writing. What is being said changes what was intended to be said. The structure of the piece of writing must be adapted to the evolving message that is being delivered to the writer by the draft and will be delivered to the reader in the finished version. (22)

For a certain kind of essayistic/journalistic writing, Don's books are pretty damn good. As an introduction to academic writing, they don't work at all, I don't think. Might even be counter-productive. But since Don never really thought of himself as an academic writer (well, he does claim to have written academic articles), but really never was an academic writer in the sense I think we think, it's not surprising.

I note another really critical function that Murray's work fulfills--that of writing coach. I find that so much of what he says resonates with my experience of writing. So, as a coach of writers, I think he has a lot to offer.