Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery (1978)

Notes from The Essential Don Murray

The most accurate definition of writing, I believe, is that it is the process of using language to discover meaning in experience and to communicate it. (124)

The better we understand how people write--how people think--the better we may be able to write and to teach writing. (142)

On Writing Research

• And yet rewriting is one of the writing skills least researched, least examined, least understood, and--usually--least taught. (123)
• A search of the literature reveals relatively few articles or books on the rewriting process. (124)
• The more I explore the revision process as a researcher and the more I experience it as a writer, the more convinced I am that there are two principal and quite separate editorial acts involved in revision. (131)
• I shall concentrate on attempting to describe internal revision, suggesting opportunities for research, and indicating some implications for the teaching of writing. (131)
• This chapter is, indeed, as I believe it was meant to be, a call for research, not a report of research. (132)
• Speculations about the writing process are fun to propose and entertaining to consider, but we will not understand the writing process unless we employ all of the methods and tools of modern research. Hypotheses suggested, such as the existence of an identifiable process of internal revision, must be subjected to tough, skeptical investigation. We must ask uncomfortable, demanding questions of the writing process. We will certainly not get the answers we expect--many of our pet theories will be destroyed--but the answers will bring new and better questions. Research into the writing process will eventually produce an understanding of how people write, which will have a profound effect on our educational procedures. We now attempt to teach a writing process we do not understand; research may allow us to teach what we understand. The following are some questions researchers might ask: (134)
• Those are just a few of the questions which should be asked of the process of internal revision. Each question will, of course, lead to additional questions. Each answer will produce even more questions, and researchers bringing their own special knowledge to the task will develop new questions. This is an exciting prospect, for the best and most obvious questions about the wiring process have, amazingly, not been asked or investigated. We have a frontier read for exploration. (139)
• How We Can Research Such Questions (this section begins on p. 139 and here he actually proposes research methods)
• It seems clear, however, that the most productive method of exploring the writing process is the case study. We do not need extensive statistical surveys as much as we need close observation of a few writers and students doing the entire writing process by well-trained observers who follow their observations with intelligent, probing interviews. This method of investigation seems the one which will yield the basic data and concepts which will be tested and developed by other means of investigation. (140)
• Most of these implications could and should be evaluated by educational researchers. The teaching of writing certainly needs far more professional inquiry than the subjective accounts, anecdotes from the trenches, which so many of us, myself included, have produced in the past. (142)

Rewriting is too often taught as punishment, not as an opportunity for discovery or even as an inevitable part of the writing process... rewriting almost always is the most exciting, satisfying part of the writing process. (124)

A flexible approach to thinking about the stages of the writing process:

• ...the stages of the process overlap. (124)
• ...writers move back and forth through all stages of the writing process as they search for meaning and then attempt to clarify it. (124)

A new stage model:

• Prevision
• Vision
• Revision

Important Points: The process of discovery is NOT relegated to just creative forms of writing (125-127)

The writer does not plan but keeps adapting those plans to what is discovered on the page. (127)

• Internal Revision
• External Revision

Internal Revision

Discovery of content

Discovery of form and structure

Discovery of language

Discovery of voice

Under Implications for Teaching (140)

Stupid kids may not be stupid. Students classified as slow may simply have the illusion writers know what they are going to say before they say it. Since they do not know what they are going to write, they may be paralyzed and not write. Such students, once they understand how writers write, may be released from this paralysis. Some slow students may then appear less slow when their writing evolves towards a subject. (141)

Unmotivated students may be motivated to write when they find writing an adventure. (141)