Introduction: How the Writing Process Was Born--and Other Conversion Narratives (Tobin)

 The writing process movement began, after all, as a critique and an alternative. In many ways, then, the term the writing process has always been misleading, suggesting both more and less than what the movement has come to represent. Every single written product is the result of some process--and almost every process leads to some sort of product. But in the composition world, the term has come to mean something else: an emphasis on the process, student choice and voice, revision, self-expression. But most of all it has come to mean a critique (or even outright rejection) of traditional, product-driven, rules based, correctness-obsessed writing instruction. The process movement, then, has been a rejection of a particular kind of product--the superficial, packaged, formulaic essays that most of us grew up writing and teaching--and a particularly kind of process--write, proofread, hand in, and then move on to next week's assignment. (5)

somewhere along the line, the followers of Murray, Macrorie, Macrimmon, and Moffett, still struggling to convince the establishment, somehow became the establishment. And to their surprise and horror they suddenly found themselves exposed on their left flank (5).

Though there is not a necessary connection between process pedagogy and personal writing, that is a teacher could assign a personal essay but ignore the process or assign a critical analysis yet nurture the process, the two have often been linked in process and perception. (6)

After all, in order to critique what had become a dominant paradigm and to create space for themselves, the first generation of process theorists posited a traditional teacher who may have been something of a straw man or woman. (8)

The 1992 conference at UNH: "The Writing Process: Prospect and Retrospect." The conference brought together many of the major early and contemporary theorists of the movement. The keynote speakers were Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Janet Emig, James Britton, James Moffett, Ken Macrorie, Lil Brannon, and Lisa Ede, while concurrent session presenters included Donald Graves, Toby Fulwiler, Andrea Lunsford, Lynn Bloom, and Richard Larsen, among many others. (9)