Reviewers On Murray's Books

Learning By Teaching: Selected Articles on Writing and Teaching By Donald M. Murray (reviewed by Richard C. Gebhardt, The Phi Delta Kappan, 1984)

one of America's most respected teachers of writing (432)

Write to Learn by Donald Murray (reviewed by Carol Berkenkotter, 1985, Rhetoric Review)

It's this concern with sharing his knowledge about writing that drives Write to Learn. It would be easy to label the book "vintage Murray," the writer passing on his professional secrets and tricks of the trade. But that would not do justice to the spirit of the text and the ethos of the man. Murray represents a significant tradition in composition studies; he embodies the principle of "writerly conduct." What he learns he shares, and he engages others in this process-students, former students and colleagues at his own and other campuses. Over the years he has created a community, an "invisible college" of fellow learners whom he draws into his ongoing conversation about the nature of the craft. Write to Learn extends what Murray practices in everyday life into the freshman composition classroom. (111)


I'm troubled by the section "Tips for Special Writing Tasks." This is the only section in which Murray deals explicitly with genres other than personal narrative. This section is designed to give readers an introduction to the kinds of writing tasks that they may expect to encounter during the college years. Murray does not place these tasks in any kind of context or writing situation-rather, they constitute a list of what one might call "generic academic discourse." This list includes a variety of tasks from "resume" to "letter applying for a job," to "literary analysis," to "case history," to "memo," and "minutes or a secretary's report." I'm not sure what rationale guides Murray's choices; nor am I sure what such general advice will do to help students handle the complex reading/writing tasks that they will face in specific disciplinary contexts.

My guess is that Murray includes this section anticipating that critics of Writing to Learn would fault him for teaching students exclusively to write eloquently about their grandmothers and other subjects that lend themselves to narrative. A critic might then argue that Murray ignores the range of discourse types that students face their freshman year, as well as the remainder of their academic careers. And, in fact, many teacher-readers will ask themselves whether the extended treatment of narrative in Write to Learn serves their best interests as teachers of freshman writers. This last question deserves serious consideration because of the shifting of the ground among those who speculate about composition pedagogy and its function in the university curriculum. (112-13)


The view of the function of writing that I've just described raises some thorny pedagogical issues for teachers of freshman writing. Many teachers who have been through the Bay Area Writing Project, or writing-across-the-curriculum workshops have themselves become engaged as writers. Many have taken their workshop experience back to their classrooms, sharing their discoveries about writing with their students. The "writerly conduct" that Don Murray practices in Write to Learn and elsewhere, and the concept of writer-as-teacher have found a wide audience among this group of teachers. I'm not sure how many will readily accept the role of primary agent of their students' socialization into the academic disciplines. Furthermore, I suspect that writing teachers trained in the humanities have ethical questions about the cultural values that "socialization" implies. (114)


As a freshman writing textbook, Write to Learn is a finely crafted work by a man who is a major force in American writing pedagogy. The principles that Murray represents writing to explore new subject matters, writing for discovery, writing for surprise, and gaining a sense of authorship in the process are principles that many composition teachers endorse. Whether they will continue to do so during a period when the shapers of university curricula are moving toward a utilitarian policy as they prepare students to enter a post-industrial, information-rich, and service-oriented society, is a major question for the 80's. (115)

Read to Write: A Writing Process Reader (reviewed by John Bean, 1987, CCC)

This is the effect of Murray's remarkable book. Not simply another anthology of essays, Read to Write has a thesis and a voice. (366)

I am grateful to Don Murray for this book. Although it is aimed at students, it is a book I will keep on my own personal bookshelf. Many of Murray's commentaries include excerpts from letters sent back and forth between Murray and fellow members of his "writing community." By showing us writers at work, the book reveals how writers read to write. The book would be suitable for any writing class that uses a reader. But it is the kind of book that makes you want to design a new course around it. I myself plan to use it in upper division courses where students are just beginning to see themselves as writers." (367)

Write to Learn, 2nd ed (reviewed by John Clifford, 1988, CCC)

To say that little in Donald Murray's textbook is original is like describing Hamlet as cliche-ridden. We are so familiar with concepts like "teach the process not the product," "we write to discover what we know," and "students need responses to their drafts in process," that we forget that many of us used to do grammar drills and lecture on formal logic. Murray's process-oriented ideas are so woven into our thinking that we forgot who said them first. I can remember my enthusiasm for Murray's Writer Teaches Writing (Houghton Mifflin, 1968), thankful to have found someone with his clarity and authenticity. Suddenly it was so obvious: young writers don't need rules; they need to take repeated, self-reflective journeys through the various activities of the composing process. With this seminal insight Murray helped shape the new interest in writing theory (99-100).

Even with the new student samples, this is primarily a book about narrative process, a limitation that is highlighted by Murray's constant references to the habits of novelists and poets. Perhaps it is the zeitgeist, but his personal remembrance essay seems dated. I would have preferred something more analytical and critical, something incisive on the folly of our foreign policy, an angry expose of sexism in advertising, a cogent argument for animal rights, something with more intellectual bite. (100)

Expecting the Unexpected (reviewed by Composition Studies, 1989)

Expecting the Unexpected (reviewed by Susan H. McLeod for JAC, 1990)

Donald Murray is a genial presence in our discipline, one of the earliest to discuss writing as a process and to speculate about how that process could best be taught. Many of us remember reading A Writer Teaches Writing in the late 1960s and having that book transform our thinking about the teaching of writing (417).

One is constantly aware while reading these essays of Murray's unique voice?warm, witty, self-deprecating, personal. (417)

Expecting the Unexpected makes us aware of how much Murray has contributed to our understanding of how practicing writers work, as well as how far we have come in the teaching of writing (and what an influence he has had) since he published his first book on the subject. (418)

These essays illustrate what is most outstanding about Murray's work: he has the ability to engage us personally as he reveals his experiences in war, his pain at his daughter's death, his joy and frustration and vulnerability in writing and in teaching writing. He may not be a researcher, but he is certainly a writer, and a splendid one. Our discipline is richer for the introspective accounts of his work. (418)