Tobin on The Writing Process Movement

 Considering that “every single written product is the result of some process—and almost every process leads to some sort of product,” the term the writing process inevitably has to refer to a more specific notion.22 Tobin defines the movement based on its essential attitudes, articulating how it comes from a response to the kind of teaching its practitioners often experienced themselves and subsequently wanted to change:

...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 particular kind of process—write, proofread, hand in, and then move on to next week’s assignment.23

Tobin, Lad, “Introduction,” in Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the ‘90s, ed. Thomas Newkirk and Lad Tobin (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1994), 5