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)

One Writer's Curriculum

Murray leads this article with the following: "Last spring the writing machine started to creak, clunk and then broke down. I didn't look to see what had gone wrong, but what, in the past, had
gone well." Later, he repeats: "I looked back to when the writing had gone well and constructed a curriculum that would recreate the conditions that produced effective writing." And further development: I studied the successful drafts--the ones that had gone easily--in memory to see what conditions had made each go well."

The focus on what is working and not on what is not working. An interesting twist...we tend to spend so much of our time asking about what's not working... There's two moves one might make when talking with someone about writing:

1. This didn't work for me.

2. This worked for me...do more of this!

Murray is focused on helping us with the second one here, and so, I think this is an implication for teacher's ears.

The move towards implications:

I want to share what I found and to suggest some implications for other composition classrooms. (16)

...the question about whether or not one can make this move...Do I feel more comfortable with the move toward suggesting or calling for research? So, he observes his process, what can he do then? Suggest implications for the classroom or call for research/study.

The penchant for taxonomy... "I found ten elements that made writing go well for me." (16)

1. Solitude. Writers must be comfortable with aloneness; free of guilt at delight in our own company. We must find our own way to achieve quiet so that we can hear the whisper of the emerging text. We must, without shame, withdraw, shut the door, and confront ourselves. While writing, we talk and listen to ourselves. That is where it all begins, alone. (17)
2. Experience. The most important experience I bring to my writing desk is not experience with language, punctuation, form, although all of those are necessary. I have a history of surprise. I know that language will lead me to meaning. I will write what I do not expect to write. (17)
3. Faith. I don't find it easy--believe it or not--to be arrogant. I find it difficult to maintain faith in my stories, to believe that my experience is significant. And yet the more personal the stories I write, the more readers recognize their own stories. We articulate the experience of others when we speak of our world in our own voices. (18)
4. Need. I am driven to write by an internal need or obsession. I do not so much write for love, praise, attention, money--although I accept all of the above--as I write because I must. (18)
5. Tension. As I look back on the writing that has gone well it has been ignited by a tension that is usually caught in a phrase, a fragment of language that captures the energy that will unlock a draft. (18)
6. Pattern. I forget the power of design in all its forms--genre, structure, order--and see them after the fact, as they appear in a written draft of others. They seem powerful and rigid when they are in place, but pattern is flexible; it is molded by meaning. Through pattern I begin to see the subject. (19)
7. Voice. I need to read aloud and write aloud. Voice, after meaning, is the most important element in effective writing. An individual human voice is what we seek in a text, that voice is what keeps us reading and makes us believe what is written. (19)
8. Ease. I want to teach lone student a craft of ease--without guilt. My student still feels guilt when he writes easily, and that is truly stupid. (19)
9. Productivity. My student's craft must be exercised. On the wall of my one-room schoolhouse is the motto nulla dies sine linea, never a day without a line. I never know when the writing will go well, I never know when the writing will go. The writer must be promiscuous, wasting language, wasting ideas to find the few that work. (20)
10. Readers. My curriculum begins in solitude and ends in community. (20)

---

Significance...Because things haven't changed...or haven't changed enough. And I can document this with passages from my own students' writing. This is an important new realization. Murray writes,

I found ten elements that made writing go well for me. The first three elements--solitude, experience, and faith--precede the page and make it possible for me to believe that writing will give meaning to my world. (16)

The key phrase there is "to believe that writing will give meaning to my world." I'm really struck by that phrase because I think we still graduate a good number of students who don't believe this, or haven't come to believe this via academic writing/literacy (but know it tacitly via personal/self-sponsored literacy). I'm thinking about passages from my ENGL 23o students from this semester. Might be worth pasting a few of these in as a form of anecdotal evidence for the claim that for many students, literacy of the kind we seek to impart in schools is not "mak[ing] it possible for [students] to believe that writing will give meaning to [their] world" (16). This is a real clear signal of why Murray's work still holds significance for us.

I know that language will lead me to meaning. (17)

...my experience told me that language would lead me to meaning. (17)

And I have found our students must write once they have discovered how writing makes the life they have lived, the life they are living, more meaningful. (18)

One might argue that what makes him significant is his insistence that the act of writing be meaningful for students. This is what makes him significant but also sort of revolutionary.

The writing that makes some people nervous:

We must go within ourselves to discover and accept our obsessions, those things that irrationally interest us, the mysteries that haunt us and are, also, the mysteries of everyone. (18)

Two thoughts:

1. Murray creates a discourse community in the absence of a real one (comprised of creative writers) and then expands his community to incorporate the burgeoning or developing discourse community of composition studies (Perl, Graves, Berkenkotter).

2. How do place Murray's pedagogy within the history of student-centered thinking during this time??? A history of student-centered pedagogy. Does this go back to Dewey?

Writing and Teaching for Surprise

NOTE: This was the lead article for the College English edition in which it appeared.

My students become writers at that moment when they first write what they do not expect to write. They experience the moment of surprise that motivates writers to haul themselves to their writing desks year after year. Writers value the gun that does not hit the target at which it is aimed.

Before they experience surprise students find writing drudgery, something that has to be done after the thinkingis over-the dishes that have to be washed afterthe guests have left. But writing is the banquet itself. As Louise Nevelson said, "My work is a feast for myself."

Writers seek what they do not expect to find. Writers are, like all artists, rationalizers of accident. They find out what they are doing afterthey have done it.

Students should share in this purposeful unknowing, for writing is not the reporting of what was discovered, but the act of exploration itself. (1)

Here is yet another moment where Murray explains what he's up to...I am intrigued by the "take you backstage"...

Let me try to take you backstage, no, not even backstage, but far beyond that into that almost always private moment when the writer is alone with language and the words escape intention. (1)

So, basically, in this piece, Murray is laying out a simple structure...he is trying to identify what he sees as "six elements that help us achieve surprise" (3). Here is a fuller explanation/context for his purpose:

The experienced writer always has the problem of the excess of surprise and must learn how to decide which mermaid is real. These are problems for experience and craft, but first there must be the possibility of surprise. That is the starting point for the effective writer and the effective teacher, and it seems to me there are six elements that help us achieve surprise. (3)

So, I'm thinking what's got Murray's attention here is that he knows how to cultivate surprise and understands its usefulness--he senses that inexperienced writers, however, may not know how to cultivate or recognize it or understand its usefulness. So, he's going to lay out the things that they need to learn and we need to teach them.

Again, I note Murray's penchant for taxonomy. In this article:

• Six elements that help us achieve surprise
• Eleven types of surprise "the writer experiences" (p. 5)

I think this is something to explore in further detail in my article--the parallel between what Murray was doing and what all those 19th century early Ph.D.s and scientists were doing. I don't know that he intended to engage a similar process as they went through, but he ended up doing so. I think there is a powerful metaphor here for thinking about Murray's work--to understand the parallel between his work and what they were doing back in the 19th century, when fields were just being created, is, I think, an important way to understand him.

So, what are the six elements?

• Expectation: The wonderful thing about surprise is that the more you experience surprise the easier it becomes to experience it. Surprise breeds surprise. (3)
• Habit: I will be surprisedby what I write if I'm in the habit of putting words on paper even if I do not have the time to write. (4)
• Ease: I used to force writing, to try to make mashed potatoes pass through a keyhole. But it didn't work. If I am prepared then the writing will flow. (4)
• Recognition: One of the nice things about surprise is that after you've had one or two or three surprises happen then you become a veteran of surprise and will begin to recognize it. (5)
• Pounceability: The writer, surprised by what is appearing on the page, must cultivate the craft to take advantage of it. The word, the pattern, the fragment, the sentence appears, and the writer must learn how to follow the clue towards meaning. (6)
• Acceptance: Surprise, though exciting, may be a discomforting gift. When we are surprised we often do not like what we discover. (6)

As someone who has been asking students to talk about the things that surprise them when they write, I really appreciated Don's elaboration of the kinds of surprises we might expect/experience as writers (see p. 5):

1. There is the surprise of perception that I experience when the character in my novel saw no color.
2. There was the surprise of recollection when I heard that terrible cough left over from a previous war.
3. There is the surprise of connection when I related my surprise in writing and my students' surprise to their development as writers.
4. There is the surprise of resolution when we see the solution to a problem we
5. have been circling in our writing.
6. There is the surprise of celebration when we recreate something--a moment, an event, a person, a scene--and can stand back from it.
7. There is the surprise of implication, the surprise of understanding, the surprise of caring when we feel more than we expect to feel...
8. ...and the surprise of pattern when a whole complex of connections click into place on the page.
9. And there are those especially significant surprises: the surprise of authority--I know what others need to know
10. ...and the surprise of voice--I can hear myself on the page.

I'm struck--and this is new, I've not written about this yet--by the way that Murray teaches not just how to be better writers, but also how to be better readers of others writing:

And, in writing this, I realize my habit includes the stimulation I receive from those with whom I can share my early drafts. These people change by circumstance and, to some degree, by the genre in which I'm writing. But they have two elements in common; they write themselves and can accept the draft as a draft, and they make me want to write when I leave them. These are very special colleagues, these test readers. They can be tough, they can be supportive, they can attack and comfort, often at the same time. They are important because they allow me to stand back from my work and gain distance on it, and because, through their faith that I have something worth saying, they can draw me back to my work. (4)

Should this go under my For Teacher's Ears section? I think so, particularly the part about "they make me want to write when I leave them." I don't think that many teachers think about this kind of orientation/attitude, modeled so well for me by TRN.

Murray's ONE TRUE THING:

We do not write to repeat what others have written, but to discover our own surprises, what we have to say and how we can say it. (7)

The problem with schooling/education...where does this fall? Student-centered, I think:

If acceptance is hard for the writer, it is harder still for the teacher, for education is geared up for sameness. We want our students to perform to the standards of other students, to study what we plan for them to study, and to learn from it what we or our teachers learned.

Yet our students learn, at least in writing, if they experience difference. The curriculum calls for sameness, and we unleash them into an activity that produces difference.

...We must learn to accept and delight in the difference we find in our students, for surprise is the most significant element in writing. (7)

A Writer's Geography: One Writer At Work

And in taking you into the workshop of the professional writer--he does it for love and money--you may see implications for the classroom. In case you don't, I will suggest a few at the end of this experiment. (176)

Again, I am struck by the language of work and the connections to workplace writing and the notion of legitimate peripheral participation or apprenticeship or whatever these terms are to think through how writing is learned on the job...how Murray is borrowing this approach (novice, master) and bringing it to teaching and how much more SENSE this makes than the methods of teaching writing--direct instruction--en vogue at the time and perhaps even now.

A difference is that the writing is not in service of the work--or maybe it is. If it is the case that in the workplace, writing is in the service of accomplishing some task--of getting something done, in Murray's workplace, writing is in service of the accomplishing learning, discovery, realization--of figuring something out, working something through, thinking. It is a process by which you accomplish something else. Like here:

I am not writing what I have thought, but writing catches me in the act of thinking--if you are lucky. (184)

The alternative, as we know, is writing for evaluation and/or sorting. And Murray wouldn't have seen much value in this. But I'm struck by the way he imported his experience on the job, and teh way writing is learned on the job, into the writing classroom--and I don't think anyone has said this or written about this. The gift he gave us was his experience as a professional writer and the way writing is learned on the job...and can one argue that this is more effective? That this is a better way of teaching writing? I'm not sure I know of anyone who does argue this, but it seems like an argument one could make, especially given the ways in which writing was being learned or taught at the time that Murray came on the scene. I think that this needs to be one of the threads I take up in the piece...

There is no one right way--This may be another theme worth exploring...

You must understand there is no one way. This is the account of one expedition across the page; each expedition is different, full of surprises, and that is why I haul my creaky bones to the desk and begin. (177)

---

To know where I need to go next I do not look to the rhetorical tradition, past experience, rule books, I look at the paragraph I have just written. What comes next? (180)

What to say about this? A trust of the self?

In closing I would like to go back over this expedition and point out some things I see that may have implications for the classroom. I expect you will see others--and not agree with all of mine. Good. My theology is based on difference. (193)

Wow. What an OPENING...Thanks Don.

Where Was I Headed When I Left

Common Threads...

My reading of what writers say about writing is an important form of shop talk for me. It stimulates my thoughts, helps me understand the writing process and often strikes unexpected sparks. (171)

My impatience with those elements of academic life--and those qualities of academics--with which I should not be impatient. It is foolish to be angry at a giraffe for being a giraffe. (172)

Not so much a fear that I have become the masks that I have learned to wear but a feeling that I can now toss them all to the audience and soft shoe off stage. (172)

The more I went to school the worse I did at school. (173)

Words

My uncles recited poems to me as they walked the floor with me as a child. My father, the floorwalker, was away taking care of customers and so my uncles walked with me. I heard the great rhymes of the popular poets orated past my ear. My grandmother sang and told stories all day, each with a moral. And the sermons by pastors who could speak in a hundred voices as they acted out the Bible or debated with the Devil and interpreted God. I lived in a house of words. I heard their music, saw that they could make life more than it was, clarify, expand, concentrate, give meaning. (173)

One Writer's Secrets

I note the following, from the editor, Richard Larson, of the CCC 37.2 issue, in his "Editor's Note":

Most of the items in the May issue are concerned, broadly speaking, with matters of "scholarship"and "research." The subject is approached from different perspectives: that of the faculty member carrying on and seeking outlets for his or her scholarship; that of the researcher trying to keep abreast of our field; that of the teacher considering how texts try to embody some of the fruits of research; that of the teacher trying to help students learn to conduct research. But all the items look at steps in what may usefully be viewed as a single, extended process: that of gathering, embodying, disseminating, organizing, and applying knowledge--about or for writing.

To begin, Donald Murray offers guidance to scholars in our field about how to draft and complete scholarly (and other) essays. Then, for those who have followed Murray's advice or have developed their own strategies, Chris Anson provides us all with a list of journals, in several fields, that publish writings about rhetoric and composition. (145).

This is a really terrific article that was the lead piece in CCC in 37.2, 1986. Many things here to consider. But basically, the piece is practical. There are two sections:

• Attitudes that allow Writing
• Some Tricks of the Academic Trade

As Murray dispenses his wisdom, many things of interest to me and this project.

Murray thinking about himself as outsider in academia, he calls himself "a bustling ducking among swans" and writes "I was far from the normal academic, and I hoped that my confessions would inspire others whose counsel might be more helpful to young scholars and researchers" (158).

And something occurs to me that hasn't really occurred to me before--but this outside status that he both confesses and cultivates...there is a persuasive appeal here to a field that has thought of itself as an outsider in academia and to folks, writing teachers, who have often felt that they are outsiders among academics. We identify and take solace in Murray's outsider status. He tells us, as a field, but also as individuals, that it's okay to be an outsider--fun, in fact. This seems really important. An outsider writing to a discipline that thinks of itself as outside of the academic tradition and to outsiders working within an institution where they, perhaps, feel themselves to be outsiders (grad students, lecturers/TAs).

Another theme which emerges from this piece and about which I haven't written or thought much has to do with Murray's awareness of the endeavor in which he is engaged--the academic community. He reveals an understanding of academic work and the academic community in this piece that, I think, we may not associate with him--especially if we think of him as an expressionist. So, here are some passages which reveal his understanding of academic work and academic writing:

No publication is the final theological word on a subject. Too many academics believe they have to write the article or book on their topic. That is impossible. Each publication is merely a contribution to a continuous professional conversation. (159)

(That would be a fun quote to use as an epigraph in an article about Donald Murray. Very surprising, very shocking.) One more:

I began to write when I realized all I had to do was speculate, question, argue, create a model, take a position, define a problem, make an observation, propose a solution, illuminate a possibility to participate in a written conversation with my peers. (159-160)

And one more:

Write early to find out what you know and what you need to know. Publish early to participate in the game of academic exploration. (164)

I like that phrase, "game of academic exploration."

And one more:

Publishing allows us to belong to a large community of scholars. We can contribute to that community, and the more we put in, the more we will take away that is of value to both ourselves and our students. (169)

Another theme or thread that is revealing itself to me as I work--Murray's own reflections on his position/location/function/purpose within the field or discipline of composition. He writes:

Ask your own questions and find your own answers. Few people talked about the writing process when I started publishing in this field. No matter, it was what interested me. I didn't think my articles would get published, but I sent them off, and most of them were. (160)

Respect your own judgment. Of course, you should be aware of the scholarship that has preceded you, but pay close attention to what you see with your own eyes, hear with your own ears, think with your own mind. Ours is not only a profession of confirmation but also of exploration. I have published personal answers to my own questions about how writers read and write, not so much to provide answers as to provoke research, since I have found few people dealing with questions in our discipline which I believe are obvious--and fundamental. If I publish my guesses, others may respond with their truths. (164)

----

I think the thing I am struck by here is the way Murray is completely knowledgeable about how academic writing works (contributing to a conversation) and yet, I'm not sure that he frames his own teaching in these terms. Why not teach undergraduate students about writing as contributing to a conversation, as I am trying to do and as WAW tries to do? Murray's pedagogy does seem non-academic in many ways...instead of helping students learn how to enter into conversations he seems to be more interested in helping them find something interesting to say and in helping them develop habits and attitudes that will get writing done.

Decisions and Revisions: The Strategies of a Publishing Writer

Here is the epigraph for my article:

"....in the absense of more proper academic resources, I have made a career of studying myself while writing." (169)

I am struck here, again, by Murray's candor about his anxiety/insecurity:

First a note on self-exposure, a misdemeanor in most communities. I have long felt the academic world is too closed. We have an ethical obligation to write and to reveal our writing to our students if we are asking them to share their writing with us. I have felt writers should, instead of public readings, give public workshops in which they write in public, allowing the search for meaning to be seen. I've done this and found the process insightful--and fun. (169)

And, in the absense of more proper academic resources, I have made a career of studying myself while writing. I was already without shame. When Carol Berkenkotter asked me to run in her maze I gulped, but I did not think I could refuse. (emphasis added, 169)

So, the question is, how does Murray contribute to the field of composition/rhetoric in this article? How does this position him differently--as opposed to expert or craftsman, he is now lab rat. Another gift he gives us, in a way, right? The gift of himself.

But also, an important point about context and writing. Murray writes:

I have also been fascinated by protocol analysis research. It did seem a fruitful way (a way, there is no one way) to study the writing process. I was, however, critical of the assignments I had seen given, the concentration on inexperienced students as subjects, and the unrealistic laboratory conditions and time limitations. (169)

And Berkenkotter explains, earlier on in the article,

I began the investigation with a critical eye regard- ing what he has said about revision, he with an equally critical attitude toward methods of research on cognitive processes. (156)

Murray's concern here and his willingness to participate in Berkenkotter's study is important to note, given what he has been accused of: he is concerned about the way social context has been stripped of early protocol analysis studies. CONTEXT. Writing is a social act, Murray feels, which cannot accurately be captured by putting someone in a lab and telling them to write. This seems important.

Wow, this line sort of captures Murray's project in a nutshell, might make for an interesting title or sub-heading or something:

"turning up the volume knob on the muttering I do under my breath as I write" (170)

On genre knowledge:

I suspect that when we begin to write in a new genre we have to do a great deal of revision, but that as we become familiar with a genre we can solve more writing problems in advance of a completed text. (171)

On correcting himself:

Too often in my teaching and my publishing I have given the false impres- sion that we do one thing, then another, when in fact we do many things simultaneously. (172)

Powerful ending:

If I am the first writer to be naked, then it is up to those other writers who do not think they look the same to take off their clothes. I hope they do not appear as I do; I would be most depressed if I am the model for other writers. I hope, and I believe, that there must be a glorious diversity among writers. What I think we have done, as rat and ratee, is to demonstrate that there is a process through which experienced writers can be studied under normal working conditions on typical writing projects. I think my contribution is not to reveal my own writing habits but to show a way that we can study writers who are far better writers than I. (172)

The Listening Eye

(Originally Posted 9/29/10, 9:29am)

I'm increasingly intrigued by the idea of how we think about or classify Murray when we talk to ourselves about the field of composition--what he contributed, what his role was, how his work was/is useful. This morning, I came across this passage in a book review by Chris Anson (CCC, 62.1, Sept 2010). Essentially, Anson is trying to recreate a conversation he had with a professor in grad school. The professor was trying to imagine a class in which he would teach "Ten Great Books in Composition Studies." Anson wonders:

Would the list include more instructionally oriented books, I asked--Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers or Donald Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing? Possibly. (217)

This passage jives with some things that I was thinking about a good deal as I read over Murray's article "The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference." It's a short and easy read. The thing that I come away with, reading this, is the generosity of Murray, who, at this point, had been teaching writing for something like 15-18 years, sharing his process with us.

I've spent some time in other blog entries thinking about the things that Murray says that I want my students to hear--that I think are still relevant. I've been cataloguing some of these. This article, The Listening Eye, has me thinking about the things that Murray says that I want others to hear about the process of teaching writing. It occurs to me that what we do when we interact with student writing is not something much talked about and perhaps even much studied--inside composition or out. These days. Is that right? These days?

I feel like what Murray is sharing with us in this piece is his process, but also his enthusiasm and his passion for the process. He is sharing an orientation towards students and towards their writing that I think infects or has infected my own disposition and perhaps others. He is, perhaps, a bit over-the-top at times, but still, this attitude or orientation seems to me important. He's talking about what it's like to do the work (of teaching writing) and how he feels about doing that work. That seems to me an all-too-rare thing these days. I'm not sure where I might find that sort of writing. And yet, so much of my time, our time, is consumed with reading student writing, why wouldn't we be or aren't we talking about it with one another in professional venues?

Of one of his students, Murray writes,

I am an observer of her own learning and I am eager to hear what she will tell me.

I am surprised at this eagerness. I am embedded in tenure, undeniably middle-aged, one of the gray, fading professors I feared I would become, but still have not felt the bitterness I saw in many of my own professors and see in some of my colleagues. I wonder if I've missed something important, if I'm becoming one of those aging juveniles who bound across the campus from concert to lecture, pleasantly silly. (149)

Later, Murray returns to one of his frequent themes--the notion of alienation from his colleagues, fear of discovery and fraud. This is something that i've been thinking about a good deal. There is a Socratic element to this posture he adopts--going around asking questions of the community that the community doesn't want to have asked (not really Socratic?). His is the posture of the outsider--reveling in this role while simultaneously battling the endless insecurities that come with feeling that one is an outsider:

It doesn't seem possible to be an English teacher without the anxiety that I will be exposed by my colleagues. They will find out how little I do; my students will expose me to them; the English Department will line up in military formation in front of Hamilton Smith Hall and, after the buttons are cut off my Pendleton shirt, my university library card will be torn once across each way and let flutter to the ground. (149)

I think of the ways that Murray gives us the eminently practical in this piece. The "how to":

I think I've begun to learn the right questions to ask at the beginning of a writing conference:

• What did you learn from this piece of writing?
• What do you intend to do in the next draft?
• What surprised you in the draft?
• Where is the piece of writing taking you?
• What do you like best in the piece of writing?
• What questions do you have of me? (151)

As I continue to think about how Murray thought about his own work--an important piece of this project because I want to work against, I think, the desire by some to define Murray in one way (Berlin) and to ask the question of how Murray, himself, thought about his work. This seems an important part of my project--to allow him to speak, since he, perhaps, never did speak. My sense is that once Berlin's piece came out and Murray began to be marginalized, his position was not to fight back. And so I imagine, what would he have said? He might have said, my work tells you everything you need to know about how to classify/define me. And if he said this, and I was charged with finding the passages in his work where he thinks through his own role, through what he has to offer to the field, what would be the passages? Well, this one:

I feel as if I have been searching for years for the right questions, questions which would establish a tone of master and apprentice, no, the voice of a fellow craftsman having a conversation about a piece of work, writer to writer, neither praise nor criticism but questions which imply further drafts, questions which draw helpful comments out of the student writer. (152)

I'm really moved by this notion of master/apprentice. I don't think it is an orientation that teachers/professors assume when they read student work. And yet, they should. If we assume that the work, the writing, is part of the process of socializing students into the ways of knowing/doing in particular academic disciplines, then we very much think of ourselves as master/apprentice and fellow craftsman. And yet, I don't think that many of us think of ourselves in that way when reading student writing. 

My sense is that it is often about examination, looking for right/wrong answers, etc.

IMPORTANT CONNECTION: Lave and Wenger write about legitimate peripheral participation or situated learning--the way people learn things and, in particular, the way they learn in the workplace (cognitive apprenticeship). It occurs to me now that in some ways this kind of relationship is what Murray was trying to set up in the writing classroom. There is wisdom here, I think. This is an interesting thread to consider and explore. His intuition lead him theory. To contextualize this a bit more, see WRW p. 82-end of ch. 4.

That passage, to get back to my original purpose, does capture Murray's own sense of the work and his role. Not lecturer and not expressivist, but fellow craftsman--an orientation that, I think, far too few of us adopt or assume in relation to our students. Those questions, above, also do much to suggest Murray's own sense of his work.

Here is the passage, one of many, which nicely captures the student-centered nature of Murray's pedagogy. I should be collecting these and I should start some blog entries collecting quotes for particular threads I'm developing.

[My students] follow language to see where it will lead them, and i follow them following language. It is a matter of faith, faith that my students have something to say and a language in which to say it. (153)

Murrayisms and/or paradoxes:

The writing teacher has the excitement of reading unfinished writing. (153)

What did Don's students write about? No, it wasn't an introduction to academic writing. That's not what he was after. And the paradoxes are considerable: my guess is that he would have hated imagining himself as the one who introduces his students to academic writing. My guess is that he thought that a lot of academic writing was bad and boring. And yet, he did academic writing, or a kind of academic writing. It was published in academic journals. Wouldn't be anymore, though. Anyway, this paragraph captures it, I think:

Now that I've been a teacher this long I'm beginning to learn how to be a student. My students are teaching me their subjects. Sometimes I feel as if they are paying for an education and I'm the one getting the education. I learn so many things. What it feels like to have a baby, how to ski across a frozen lake, what rights I have to private shoreline, how complex it is to find the right nursery school when you're a single parent with three children under six years old. (155)

And so, I find myself wondering, is my current pedagogical outlook one in which I think about how to introduce my students to academic writing while also talking about how writing itself gets done?

A final passage, a long one, but one which returns to the idea of what he says that needs to be heard by all who assign writing:

I realize I not only teach the writing process, I follow it in my conferences. In the early conferences, the prewriting conferences, I go to my students; I ask questions about their subject, or if they don't have a subject, about their lives. What do they know that I don't know? What are they authorities on? What would they like to know? What would they like to explore? I probably lean forward in these conferences; I'm friendly, interested in them as individuals, as people who may have something to say. 

Then, as their drafts begin to develop and as they find the need for focus, for shape, for form, I'm a bit removed, a fellow writer who shares his own writing problems, his own search for meaning and form. 

Finally, as the meaning begins to be found, I lean back, I'm more the reader, more interested in the language, in clarity. I have begun to detach myself from the writer and from the piece of writing which is telling the student who to write it. We become fascinated by this detachment which is forced on us as a piece of writing discovers its own purpose. 

After the paper is finished and the student starts on another, we go back through the process again and I'm amused to feel myself leaning forward, looking for a subject with my student. I'm not coy. If I know something I think will help the student, I share it. But I listen first--and listen hard (appearing casual)--to hear what my student needs to know. (154-155)

I love this passage for its explicitness and for the leaning back and forward. It feels right in some important ways.

Writing Badly To Write Well

This is the article Don wrote when he was invited to speak at the sentence combiners conference.

Don shares his process (there is a connection here with his terror at Berkenkotter's assignment):

As I indicate in the following article, I thought Don Daiker was joking when he invited me to speak before a conference of sentence combiners. I was challenged, however, by the unexpected opportunity and accepted; then, as the date grew closer, I was terrified--a common sequence. (101)

On the importance of sharing our thinking with our students (and a critique of the education system):

This cleaned up thinking, thinking after I know I am thinking, late pre-thinking but still a kind of thinking--a kind of thinking important for our students to know about--that we think as confusedly as they do, when we are lucky, if our education still allows it (remember that Snodgrass poem "The Examination"), they should see it in action, not because they have to learn it, they know it, but because they have to learn it, they know it, but because they should be allowed it... (102)

We see the Murray paradoxical thinking at work:

We don't know enough about how to write badly--and why. (104)

I've got to fail more in my writing. (105)

...our students must have the experience of writing what they do not expect to write. That is the essential writing experience, and if you do not feel that firsthand, you cannot understand writing (110).

You do have to write badly to write well. Of course. Badly in the sense of neatness and completeness, for effective thinking isn't neat and complete. (111)

If it can be studied and understood, perhaps we can learn to teach our students to write badly so they can write well. (119)

Connecting his work to other's in the field, and I find this really intriguing:

Yes, I like Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose but I guess what we have, what I teach, what I force is often too much reader-based prose when the writing I most admire that stretches me because it stretched the writer is writer-based prose, writing that continues to search for a meaning after it leaves the writer's desk and can we tolerate it then in our composition classes? (111)

This passage nicely captures Murray's thinking about his role, who he is, what he does, how he thinks about and describes his own process. And this strikes me as an interesting thread worth exploring or thinking about--Murray was described or "labeled" as an expressivist, but how did he think about his own work and his own purpose or the contribution he was seeking to make? Could I locate passages which help me sketch this out? I could, of course, adn have been doing so all along. This one helps me quite nicely:

What is the instructive line? What is it in a line that leads me on, that teaches me that meaning may lie ahead? Well, it's not something that I think about normally; it's something I do. If you think about hitting a curve, you won't. And so I don't think about it. But if the batter becomes a coach? Alright, I have to think about it. To make money I am led to arrogance. I presume to teach, to find out what I do, and then, no matter how embarrassing or unacademic and unprofound and unintellectual, to expose it, to reveal what is simple and obvious to others. And then to be surprised, for it isn't, apparently, quite so obvious--and perhaps not so simple. (115)

I am really moved by this passage. There are several things to note:

1. The metaphor--baseball, players, coaches. So when Don, himself, thought about his contribution, his work, this is how he thought of it, the movement from player to coach. Makes perfect sense.
2. The part about embarrassing, unacademic, intellectual, unprofound...these all signal his own insecurities about his work and his feelings about his position in the academy.
3. I am moved by the idea of listening to Don--allowing Don to tell us how to think about his own contribution and place in the field of composition. Don listens to the "line"--we listen to him and allow him to speak for himself and partly, perhaps, that's what I'm wanting to do here.

This is the sort of passage that I want my students to hear and perhaps I should start thinking of the "themes" that I want them to hear. This one captures one such theme:

In our desire to be responsible and to make our students write correctly there is a danger that they will misunderstand and think they have to write correctly from the beginning. But language will not be a tool of thinking unless our students are able to allow language to run free and stumble and fall...And writers have to do a lot of falling if they are to write anything worth reading. (118)

But I have other students who write too well too soon, and I have to help them--and I think I too often fail them--to get beyond their correctness, their teacher-induced, parent-induced, society-induced, genetic-induced desire to be correct, as if language could be controlled by rules. The whole spectrum of students I work with--from remedial through graduate students to professional journalists--want correctness before meaning, before voice. If writers are to find the instructive line they must realize it is not only permissible to write badly, it is essential. We have to let language lead us to meaning. (118)

Murray closes the article with a call to research:

A call for research. We need to understand how writing can be made incorrect in a productive way. How do writers write badly to write well? What instructs them in their journal notes, in their mind before there are notes, and between the notes, in their early drafts, what allows them to see what we cannot see? (118-119)

Teaching the Other Self: The Writer's First Reader

This piece was published as the lead article in the issue of CCC in which it appeared.

Work

The act of writing might be described as a conversation between two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench. The self speaks, the other self listens and responds. The self proposes, the other self considers. The self makes, the other self evaluates. The two selves collaborate: a prob- lem is spotted, discussed, defined; solutions are proposed, rejected, suggested, attempted, tested, discarded, accepted. (140)

The conference isn't a psychiatric session. Think of the writer as an apprentice at the workbench with a master workman, a senior colleague, stopping by once in a while for a quick chat about the work. (146)

Calls for Research:

The act of writing might be described as a conversation between two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench. The self speaks, the other self listens and responds. The self proposes, the other self considers. The self makes, the other self evaluates. The two selves collaborate: a prob- lem is spotted, discussed, defined; solutions are proposed, rejected, suggested, attempted, tested, discarded, accepted. (141)

We shall have to wait for perceptive and innovative research by teams of reading and writing researchers to document the complex kind of reading that is done during the writing process. (143)

Role of Student/Role of Teacher:

There is only one way the student can learn map-reading-and that is in the field. Books and lectures may help, but only after the student writer has been out in the bush will the student understand the kind of reading essential for the exploration of thinking. The teacher has to be a guide who doesn't lead so much as stand behind the young explorer, pointing out alternatives only at the moment of panic. Only after the writer/explorer has read one map and made the trip from meaning intended to meaning realized, will the young writer begin to trust the other self and have faith that it will know how to read other trails through other territories. (141-142)

The teacher brings the other self into existence, and then works with that other self so that, after the student has graduated, the other self can take over the function of teacher. When the student speaks and the student and the teacher listen, they are both informed about the nature of the writing process that produced the draft. This is the point at which the teacher knows what needs to be taught or reinforced, one step at a time, and the point at which the student knows what needs to be done in the next draft. Listening is not a normal composition teacher's skill. We tell and they lis- ten. But to make effective use of the other self the teacher and the student must listen together. (143)

Interacts w/ Composition Research:

The reading writer-the map-maker and map-reader-reads the word, the line, the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the entire text. This constant back-and-forth reading monitors the multiple complex relationships between all the elements in writing. Recursive scanning-or reviewing and previewing--during revision is beginning to be documented by Sondra Perl, Nancy Sommers, and others. But further and more sophisticated investiga- tion will, I believe, show that the experienced writer is able, through the writer's other self, to read what has gone before and what may come after- ward during the writing that is done before there is a written text, and during the writing that produces an embryonic text. (142)

I have been impressed by how effectively primary students, those in the first three grades in school, have a speaking other self. Fortunately this other self that monitors the writing process has been documented on tape in a longitudinal study conducted in the Atkinson, New Hampshire, schools by Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins and Susan Sowers at the University of New Hampshire. There the other self has been recorded and analyzed. The most effective learning takes place when the other self articulates the writing that went well. Too much instruction is failure-centered. It focuses on error and unintentionally reinforces error. (146)

Validates Voice/Input of Writers:

Many teachers of writing, especially those who are also teachers of litera- ture, are deeply suspicious of the testimony of writers about their own writing. It may be that the critic feels that he or she knows more than the writer, that the testimony of writers is too simple to be of value. But I have found in my own work that what students and professional writers say about their own writing process is helpful and makes sense in relation to the text. (143)

The more inexperienced the student and the less comprehensible the text, the more helpful the writer's comments [on his/her own draft]. Again and again with remedial students I am handed a text that I simply cannot understand. I do not know what it is supposed to say. I cannot discover a pattern of organization. I cannot understand the language. But when the writer tells me what the writer was doing, when the other self is allowed to speak, I find that the text was produced rationally. The writer followed misunderstood instruction, inappropriate principles, or logical processes that did not work. (144)

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This was a great essay and I was able to make all sorts of interesting connections to some of the ideas I've been kicking around with regard to metacognition, Beaufort, etc.

The basic thrust of this article is that we need to teach students how to read their own work as a more experienced writer would or does. I take this to to be, they need to learn how to watch themselves and make sense of their process as it is unfolding.

It's also interesting to note the way that Murray is increasingly aware of the existence of a "field" and of "scholars" who are studying the writing process. He references the work of Sonda Perl, Donald Graves, Nancy Sommers in this piece. Part of this may have been because he participated in the protocol analysis with Carol Berkenkotter. He writes:

There are now many trained writing researchers who can collaborate with the trained researcher in reading, for the act of writing is inseparable from the act of reading. (88-89)

But further and more sophisticated investigation will, I believe, show that the experienced writer is able, through the writer's other self... (emphasis added 90).

I note here that phrase "experienced writer" and I find a similarity with Beaufort's desire to understand what she calls expert writing performances and what skills/knowledge domains it takes to enact such performances.

When the student speaks and the student and teacher listen they are both informed about the nature of the writing process that produced the draft. (91)

He is encouraging the kind of communication ABOUT writing that we encourage when we ask students to write literacy narratives or autoethnographies about writing.

Listening to Writing

I note, again, the importance of the word "speculate" in this piece, coming, as it does, in the first sentence:

In trying to write an essay which would speculate about how the writer discovers the draft which marks the watershed between prewriting and rewriting, I heard a poem. (55)

It's becoming increasingly apparent to me, that this was Murray's work and this term is a good one. To speculate. That's what he's up to, no doubt. He doesn't have the critical framework or education to move beyond speculation to scholarly investigation--so he cites people like Emig, Perl, Graves. But he can speculate on his own process and given his status as a professional, working, Pulitzer Prize winning writer, he feels legitimacy in doing so.

I think that one of the things that I appreciate from this article is the nuts and bolts that Murray shares about how he gets the work done. For example, the following passage:

Time is also important. I try to start each day with a few quiet moments when I listen for writing, listen to hear the words I watch my pen put on the page. I may hear--and capture--drafts, titles, lines, leads, details, lists, ideas, memories, scenes, notes for stories, textbooks, reportage, profiles, essays, poems, plays; whatever comes to my ear is captured on the page. The quiet moments when this happens have a religious quality for me. This quiet time is made possible by habit. I do not get up eager to write. I do not get up even eager to get up. But it is my habit to turn on the timer, open the notebook, uncap the pen, and listen.

Writing usually comes--100 words, 5, 152, 18, 249. No matter. I am simply waiting, listening.

If no words come that is fine. I suppress the panic I feel at silence. There will be another day; the writing will come if I wait, and I often do have to wait minutes which seem like hours. (56)

That is a terrific passage. I love the fact that he includes the number of words that he writes--odd numbers, true and real numbers that make this seem true and real. I feel like this is the sort of passage that students can benefit from reading. This is the "how to" of writing, how does the process work for one accomplished writer. I imagine that my students have NO IDEA that this is how writing happens. I want the students to hear the sentences: "If no words come that is fine. I suppress the panic I feel at silence" (56) to know that that, too, is part of the process.

More practical advice:

I have learned that writing evolving often stumbles, but what seem to be mistakes often turn out to be keys to meaning. (60)

We will write nothing but garbage if we do not practice critical thinking towards the end of the writing process, but it is dangerous to be too critical too early. The better educated the writer, the more important it is to suspend the critical element of that education in the early stages of the process. (61)

I must somehow, as a teacher, a husband, a son, a father, a friend, a colleague, a citizen, a professional, a busy-busy-busy man so proud of my busyness, find time to listen so I will hear what I have to say. If I am able to be quiet within myself something may appear on the page which may become writing and, when that happens, my job is to listen to the evolving writing. The piece of writing will, if I listen carefully, tell me how it needs to be written. it will develop its own shape and form, its own destination, its own voice, its own meaning, and it will finally detach itself from its maker and find readers who may hear things in it I never heard. (68)

Too often, when we teach writing, we give our students the misconception we plan writing, that we intend what will appear on the page. They are frustrated when they are not able to visualize before the first draft what will appear on their page. The students think they are dumb. We must be honest and let them know how much writing is unconscious or accidental. You do not think writing; you write writing.

Of course, even as I say that, I can think of exceptions. The elements of intention and planning vary depending on our experience, our purpose, our audience, our writing tasks, but the best writing is often unintended. We usually do not know what we want to say before we say it in non-fiction as well as poetry. (71)

I love this passage. I love the first part, but I may love the double-take more. I love the both/and, but, ultimately, the commitment to the unexpected.

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I think that one thing that I recognize in this piece, that I have not seen yet, and I'm not sure what this means, if anything, is the movement towards explicit use of the "I". In other essays and articles I've read, Murray will often refer to himself (well, sort of) in the third person--"the practicing writer," or "the published writer." It's like he was trying to put this distance between himself and his ideas, as if felt that he needed to construct his authority in a certain way in order to be taken seriously. In some ways, it's like he's the kid trying not to say "I" as the teacher told him.

The first sentence of "Listening to Writing," published in 1980, reads:

In trying to write an essay which would speculate about how the writer discovers the draft which marks the watershed between prewriting and rewriting, I heard a poem. (55)

That is a striking first line. Compare it to two other first sentences/passages from other articles:

We command our students to write and grow frustrated when our "bad" students hesitate, stare out the window, dawdle over blank paper, give up and say, "I can't write," while the "good" students smugly pass their papers in before the end of the period ("Writing Before Writing" p. 28 in Newkirk)

Here, Murray uses the collective "we," appealing to his audience of writing teachers and seeking identification with them.

Here's another one:

At the beginning of the composing process there is only blank paper. At the end of the process there is a piece of writing which has detached itself from the writer and found its own meaning, a meaning the writer probably did not intend ("Writing as Process" p. 6 in Newkirk).

Here we see Murray invoking "the writer"--a generalized term. I note that this chapter was also published in 1980.

All of this has got me wondering about Murray's decision to go to the first-person in "Listening to Writing" and wondering if this really was a change. I'm not sure now that I think about it (check "The Explorers of Inner Space").

But there are these other passages in "Listening" that strike me as important, moments when Murray, essentially, lays his cards on the table:

I had thought writing appeared on the page, surprising my eye. I intended to describe and probe that process in this article. But in using myself as my own experimental rat..." (63)

Yes, of course, this is what he is always doing, HAS always been doing. This is, I'm thinking, the first time that I have seen him actually comes out and admit this, though. Another passage follows just after this one:

As I examine what I usually do as I write... (63)

I wonder what caused him to say these things in this article, at this time (and I fear that I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill).

---

I note this passage...where the "literary critics," perhaps take on the role of the school marm, of that schoolmaster ghost lurking in Murray's past:

Sometimes I fear my literary colleagues, whose business, after all, is critical thinking, want to know what criteria are used in accepting or rejecting a discovered thought as if the criteria were external to the piece of writing. When writers, rather than critics, talk of their own writing to each other and to themselves, they ask what works and what doesn't work...The writer avoids external standards--standards which evolved from other pieces of writing in other times by other writers for other readers--and works within the piece of writing. (64)

I'm drawn to this passage and push it away at the same time. I'm drawn to the distinction between writers and critics and I think that's an important distinction for me and for Murray. I'm drawn to the idea that you don't apply external standards to the piece to determine what is it. At the same time, I'm not sure the writer avoids external standards. But I may mean something he didn't mean here.

---

A call to research: "and we need careful study of just how writers read drafts" (64).

---

One of the questions I've been raising here has to do with the transferability of Murray's pedagogy to non-creative writing situations. So many of his sources are novelists and poets. here he is taking up this question himself:

This process of listening is more dramatic and easily apparent in poetry than in narrative or in non-fiction, but the process seems more similar in all the forms of writing than it is different--at least the way I write. (69)

I also go through a similar process in writing an article such as this. I may do more conscious research and structured thinking in preparation for the writing of non-fiction; I may be aware of a predetermined length or form, a specific audience, an external purpose in writing. Still, I have to listen to the writing as it evolves within those limitations--and if I have a strong piece of writing it may bend those limitations a bit... (69)

I am struck by Murray's rhetorical and genre awareness here. I am particularly struck by that final line about bending limitations--which signals that he understands the way rhetorical situations and genres do impose limitations upon the writer, but also wants to stand up for the fact that genres can and will be bent in certain instances to writers' desires.

Write Before Writing

One thing that I am realizing more and more is the way Murray carved out or enacted a particular identity, used that identity, cultivated that identity as a way to construct authority in his writing--and how that identity may, over time, have become the thing that undermined him. The identity is embodied in any number of words or phrases: "When publishing writers..." "Newspapermen..." etc. Murray was a work-a-day writer's writer publishing in scholarly venues. The more I read, the more I realize this.

I'm also drawn to the way Murray connects with the down-and-out student--because he was one. He is annoyed by professors and students. I think these terms get under his skin. Try on this passage:

We command our students to write and grow frustrated when our "bad" students hesitate, stare out the window, dawdle over blank paper, give up and say, "I can't write," while the "good" students smugly pass their papers in before the end of the period.

When publishing writers visit such classrooms, however, they are astonished at students who can write on command, ejaculating correct little essays without thought, for writers have to write before writing.

The writers were the students who dawdled, stared out the windows, and, more often than we like to admit, didn't do well in English--or in school. (28)

I'm really struck by this sentence. I LOVE the phrase "ejaculating correct little essays"--terrific. So there is this kind of alignment, the writers and the "bad" students and the "professors" and their pontificating ("Children--and some professors--think out loud; but for most of us our speech is socially suppressed, done silently" "Writing as Process" p. 13) and the "good" students "ejaculating correct little essays without thought." There may be a connection here to his late essay "All Writing is Autobiography." For him, it certainly seemed to be.

I'm struck by Murray's eminently USEFUL and PRACTICAL and COMMON SENSE advice:

Writing teachers, however, should give careful attention to what happens between the moment the writer receives an idea or an assignments and the moment the first completed draft is begun. (28)

This is right up there with the notion, discussed in this post, that how a writer got to a finished piece of writing cannot be inferred from just looking at the piece of finished writing.

One thing that strikes me that I don't know if I've written much about is Murray's penchant for taxonomizing. In an earlier post, I called him a manifesto writer. He is also a taxonomist. And I'm feeling like I need to look into this a bit more--I'm thinking of all those 19th century "scientists" cataloguing things, making lists, creating categories. And why is he doing this? Because he is interested in the writing process, in how it works, and because no one else has studied it (yet)--or, people are just beginning to study it. So, Murray turns to his two sources of evidence: his own experience and the words of published writers (usually creative). As to taxonomies, for example, in this article, Murray offers us:

• the "one principal negative force which keeps the writer from writing and four positive forces which help the writer move forward to a completed draft" (29).
• "eight principal signals to which writers respond" during the "rehearsal" process (33).

I'm also struck by what appears to me to be the sort of haphazard organization of some of these essays. How would I outline the parts of this essay?

1. Introduction
2. Resistance to Writing/Forces of Writing
3. Rehearsal (nod to Don Graves)
4. Signals Which Say Write

In another post, I comment on Murray's use of sources and in this piece, he does draw on Graves' work again. And now, I note two things that Murray appears to have rethought as a result of his own reading and conversation.

1. You can hear Murray's enthusiasm for Graves' notion of rehearsal (as opposed to pre-writing, which was Murray's preferred term) in the following passage: "What the writer does under the pressure not to write and the four countervailing pressures to write is best described by the word rehearsal, which I first heard used by Dr. Donald Graves of the University of New Hampshire to describe what he saw young children doing as they began to write. He watched them draw what they would write and heard them, as we all have, speaking aloud what they might say on the page before they wrote. If you walk through editorial offices or a newspaper city room you will see lips moving and hear expert professionals muttering and whispering to themselves as they write. Rehearsal is a normal part of the writing process, but it took a trained observer such as Dr. Graves, to identify its significance" (31).
2. In the book chapter "Writing as Process," Murray writes: "I had always thought of this process in rather large terms--a rehearsing, a period of drafting, and a period of revising. But the significant work of Sondra Perl...has made me reconsider the time in which this process works" (10). This is interesting--so Murray thought the process was, perhaps more linear than it is? Further down, he writes: "Perl's work enabled me to see an instantaneous moving back and forth during the writing process. Minute by minute, perhaps second by second--or less at certain stages of the process--the writer may be rehearsing, drafting, and revising, looking back and looking forward, and acting upon what is seen adn heard during the backward sensing and forward sending" (10).

It's interesting to think about Murray coming on the scene in the late 1960s and realizing how little we know about how writers actually write (his primary concern, I believe). And then to realize that he stays in the scene through his career, as others begin taking up his questions and other questions and then, to what extent does he incorporate this knowledge into this own thinking and yet, simultaneously, remain on the "outside" because he is not, like Don Graves, a "trained observer."

So, then we see Murray sort of working with Graves ideas, taking them in, learning from them, testing them against what he knows intuitively--and THIS IS THE KEY POINT. In the passage in which Murray lays out Graves' notion of rehearsing, he later devolves to the kind of writing we are are much more familiar with and he is much more comfortable with: "What the writer hears in his or head..." Of course, this construction of "the writer" is problematic, but to Murray, that's his primary mode of working. What is the alternative? When he uses the phrase "the writer" or "the published writer" or "the experienced writer," what he's really saying is "I"--but, of course, he feels he cannot say "I".

In this article, I'm also struck by Murray's two calls for research, the way in which he opens up opportunities for others' investigations.

1. He is citing the work of Susan Sowers, who did a study with graduate students to try to understand whether they make their discoveries during pre-writing or writing and revisions stages (hard to separate these different stages, it seems). He writes: "This concept deserves more investigation. We need to know about both the reflective and reactive prewriting mode. We need to see if there are developmental changes in students, if they move from one mode to another as they mature, and we need to see if one mode is more important in certain writing tasks than others. We must, in every way possible, explore the significant writing stage of rehearsal which has rarely been described in the literature on the writing process (32).
2. We have interviews with imaginative writers about the writing process, but rarely interviews with science writers, business writers, political writers, journalists, ghost writers, legal writers, medical writers--examples of effective writers who use language to inform and persuade. I am convinced that such research would reveal that they also see patterns or gestalts which carry them from idea to draft. (37)

A key FRAMING quote: We know far too little about the writing process. (38)

Again, I think that the problem we sometimes face is the quickness with which Murray moves from his "speculations" to the "implications for the teaching of writing." Can one make this move as frequently as Murray does? I'm somehow comfortable with his use of the word "speculations" but uncomfortable with the move to practice, which it seems to me he makes too quickly or too easily, or without legitimacy? What is it?

We end with Murray's sympathy for the dawdlers and daydreamers:

We may need, for example, to reconsider our attitude toward those who delay writing. We may, in fact, need to force many of our glib, hair-trigger student writers to slow down, to daydream, to waste time, but not to avoid a reasonable deadline. (38)

Students who are not writing, or not writing well, may have a second chance if they are able to experience the writers' counsel to write before writing. (38)

Always the little zing at the end where he nails the last line or section with his title, central idea. Feels like the editorial writer in him coming out.

Added 2/3/14:

Also, something to think about, the things I disagree with Murray about or the things we have since learned he was wrong about:

During the rehearsal process, the experienced writer sees signals which tell the writer how to control the subject and produce a working first draft. (377)

The problematic term here, of course, is "experienced writer"--but at that time, others were writing and speaking this way as well.

Writing as Process: How Writing Finds its Own Meaning

Murray, Donald M. "Writing as Process: How Writing Finds its Own Meaning." In Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition. Eds. Timothy R. Donovan & Ben W. McClelland. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1980. 3-20. Print.

There are so many things that I am struck by with regard to this piece. Here goes...

First, I am struck by the fact that Murray references other scholars. I feel like this is not a move I have seen him make yet or not a move that I see him make often. Early in the piece, he references Janet Emig's work. This reference is really just a nod, not much substantive ("Others of us, instructed by Janet Emig (1975)..."). Next, he references Graves. Here he is borrowing--specifically, he borrows Graves' term "rehearsing," as opposed to pre-writing, claiming that it is more accurate for what happens before writing. Next, he references the work of Sondra Perl, who, he says, has changed his thinking: "I had always thought of this process in rather large terms--a rehearsing, a period of drafting, and a period of revising. But the significant work of Sondra Perl...has made me reconsider the time in which this process works" (10). This is interesting--so Murray thought the process was, perhaps more linear than it is? Further down, he writes: "Perl's work enabled me to see an instantaneous moving back and forth during the writing process. Minute by minute, perhaps second by second--or less at certain stages of the process--the writer may be rehearsing, drafting, and revising, looking back and looking forward, and acting upon what is seen adn heard during the backward sensing and forward sending" (10). I'm struck BOTH by Murray's willingness to learn and by his apparent failure to notice the back and forth or recursive series of acts we engage in when we are writing.

So, I'm interested in his use of sources--how he uses them, perhaps his lack of familiarity with how to use them? Perhaps the tentative way in which he uses them. If we can study the ways writers use sources in their writing, and we have, what can we say about the way Murray draws on others' scholarship?

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Here is Murray on writing as thinking:

This process of evolving meaning--a constant revolt against intent--motivates writers. They never cease to be fascinated by what appears on their page. Writing is an act of recording or communicating and much more. Writing is a significant act of thinking in which the symbols of language assume a purpose of their own and instruct the writer during the composing process. (6)

I'm struck by a few things here. First, I am struck by how valuable it would be for most of my students to learn that writing is about more than "recording" and "communicating." I'm still enamored of the "much more" to which Murray alludes. That "much more" is what lit my fire early on in my career as a writing instructor and its potency remains.

I wonder how far along we were, in 1980, towards acceptance of the notion that "Writing is a significant act of thinking...".

Finally, I am struck by these sentences: "This process of evolving meaning--a constant revolt against intent--motivates writers. They never cease to be fascinated by what appears on their page." Here is one of those moments where I feel myself working against Murray. They never cease to be fascinated... Really? Who says? Which writers? This strikes me as one of those large or dangerous assertions that he makes, drawing, implicitly, on his own authority and, presumably, upon his reading of quotes by famous writers. For some reason, I don't want him to make that assertion...

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I'm thinking a bit about the BIG picture with the following passage:

This process has been revered--and feared--as a kind of magic, a process of invoking the muse, of hearing voices, of inherited talent. Many writers still think that the writing process should not be examined closely or even understood in case the magic disappears. Others of us, instructed by Janet Emig (1975), attempt to understand the relationship between the chemical and electrical interaction within the brain and the writing process. I am sympathetic to both positions, but, as a writer still trying to learn my craft at fifty-four and as a writing teacher still trying to learn how to help students learn their craft, I feel an obligation to speculate upon the writing process. (6)

So many things to say here. First, the generosity at work and the realization that this is what composition is about--"to help students learn their craft." That is, I think, what separates composition from rhetoric--its rootedness in pedagogy. I really appreciate this moment from Murray and I think we see this at work as a larger theme in his work: the desire to demystify and democratize writing. Writing, he is saying, may be magical, but it can be taught and should be taught and he has taken it upon himself to help make writing more accessible to more people.

This is the democratic strain in Murray that I find so attractive. And I'm thinking now about his own ethos--coming to the teaching of writing at the post-secondary level without a Ph.D. but with a Pulitzer prize in journalism. The path Murray always takes (or constructs) is the path of humility: "as a writer still trying to learn my craft at fifty-four." This is a move Murray makes frequently, I think. Of course, he has already learned his craft. There is the fact that he cites his age--he is saying, essentially, "I am a life-long learner." Given his accomplishments, he has no reason to say this, but he does say it and says it frequently and what is the effect? If Murray is still learning his craft, than I can, too. Writing is something that can be learned, not something you are born with. Look at Murray, he's still learning.

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Another large theme that comes up at multiple times in this piece: the danger of using finished products to teach the messy process that is writing.

The process of making meaning with written language can no be understood by looking backward from a finished page. Process can not be inferred from product any more than pig can be inferred from sausage. (6-7).

The calm, logical moment when the words stand at dress parade and present a meaning gives no hint of the battles which produce that moment--or the battles which may be ahead. (17)

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Cultivating the outsider perspective:

It is very hard for traditionally-trained teachers who are not writing themselves to believe that students can write without instruction from the teacher or without assignment. (18)

My constant is change. My teaching changes from year to year and day to day. I do not teach my students what I have learned in the past. My students teach themselves what we are learning together.

Those of us who teach the writing process are comfortable with the constant change. This sets us apart from many people in the academic world who teach in a traditional or classical mode, believing there are truths which can be learned and passed on from teacher to student, from generation to generation. Their conception has its attractions; it is the one I was taught. But my life as a writer and as a teacher of writing leads me--as similar experience has led others--to a different tradition which some call developmental or truly humanistic. (25)

I think I'm noticing Murray's distance from higher education and perhaps education in general. I mean, the guy didn't love school and didn't do well in school and now, here he is, back in school, the teacher, the embodiment of school, part of the system. In this way, he is like my research participant Brad Weilbrenner--the kid who hates school growing up becomes a teacher...sort of. It's interesting to think about Murray taking a job in academia in order to have healthcare for his family...and then spending a career trying to fit in (without a Ph.D.). Add to this his own painful and frustrated experiences with school and teachers growing up and things get interesting. I was thinking of this in another context earlier this year with my own teaching--the tension that I sometimes feel with academia...being of it but simultaneously feeling not of it or wanting to work against it at the same time. This seems to have been Murray's quandary as well.

A sharper jab at the professors comes here:

We need both to record and to share, both to talk to ourselves within the enormous room of the mind and to talk to others. Children--and some professors--think out loud; but for most of us, our speech is socially suppressed, done silently. (13)

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The habit of or fondness for this kind of sentence:

The pieces of writing I have not yet thought of writing will become different from what I expect them to be when I propose them to myself. (25)

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And now onto the MEAT of this posting...I'm trying to understand or think through what Murray is DOING in this piece. Early on, he writes, "I feel an obligation to speculate upon the writing process" (6). I like this phrase and I like the tentativeness of the word "speculate." A the same time, it is hard to imagine me writing a piece in which I speculate on my own writing process and submitting it for publication in a scholarly venue. It is hard to imagine a contemporary Pulitzer Prize winner doing this either. It strikes me as a unique thing that someone would write a piece speculating about the writing process, based mostly on their own experiences, and have it appear in a scholarly venue.

Later Murray writes: "In the preceding pages I have proposed a theory of how a piece of writing finds its own meaning. That theory has come out of practice. It is rooted in the experience of making meaning with written language. Theory, however, must return to practice in our field" (17).

I am struck by the sentence where Murray says "That theory has come out of practice." Okay. Good. But then, "Theory, however, must return to practice in our field." Okay. Theory and Practice. I'm onboard. But I want to resist where he goes next. To what extent can one man theorizing about his own writing process, no matter who that man is, then take those theories and make suggestions for practice? What are the limits of this knowledge?

On the other hand, why shouldn't a pulitzer prize winning writer have something to say to the rest of us about writing and how it works?

Today, Murray would never get an audience within the field. He might get one outside. Imagine him showing up today. His book might make Barnes and Noble's writing section, but it's hard to imagine any scholarly press taking his work seriously.

But there is, undoubtedly, a huge contribution that he has made. This is where I begin thinking about Stephen NOrth and his categories of researchers, scholars, practitioners, etc. And I have to think through Murray in relation to North's ideas and, I think, talk with some others about all of this. I am asking whether Murray is authorized, in this chapter, to make the move towards informing practice that he is making, given the somewhat cock-a-mamie framework he has sketched out in the middle part of the article--a framework that seems completely arbitrary to me--perhaps because I can't understand it.

He writes: "Continued observation and reflection upon the writing process will result in new speculations. They will come because it is our desire, reinforced by our education, to connect, to make lists, charts, maps, to find patterns and orders" (16). But what will or should be the nature of those speculations? That seems to me the important question: should they be more speculations of actual writers, trying to think through and articulate this "magic" process in which they engage? Or, something else? Empirical research? Scholarly investigation (and isn't what Murray is doing scholarly investigation?)?

All Writing is Autobiography

Big Picture:

The article bio describes Murray as: "professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire." So, by this point, he had retired. It's worth trying to find out when he retired.

It's interesting to note that this article was published in the "Staffroom Interchange" section of CCC. According to the article,

Two kinds of articles make up "Staffroom Interchange": compact descriptions of specific instructional or administrative practices and fuller essays of application, speculation, and introspection. "Staffroom Interchange" essays (normally under 3,500 words) should be written in a direct, personal style and may use either in-text documentation or a compact works-cited list. Since submissions are sent to Consulting Readers for review, authors should follow the guidelines for anonymous submission outlined on the back of the title page. (66)

I would also point out that this issue of CCC was a themed issue. The theme: "Teaching and Theory in College Composition." It's hard not to conclude that what Murray is talking about in his article does not constitute their sense of "teaching and theory" in college composition.

Other questions: Was this Murray's last publication in a mainstream journal? In the first paragraph, he writes, "As I look back, I suspect that no matter how I tuned the lyre, I played the same tune" (66). If so, how do we trace the trajectory from his first to this one?

And now, onto the article itself...

I'm struck by Murray's attention to genre, the way he likes to catalogue the genres he writes. The article leads with this line: "I publish in many forms-poetry, fiction, academic article, essay, newspaper column, newsletter, textbook, juvenile nonfiction and I have even been a ghost writer for corporate and government leaders-yet when I am at my writing desk I am the same person" (66).

CLAIM: All my writing-and yours-is autobiographical. (66)

The distinction between academic and writer: In going over this draft my spellcheck hiccupped at "squenched"and "companioned." As an academic I gulped; as a writer I said, "Well they are now." (67)

The way that Murray weaves his own process, himself-in-process into the text he is writing is captured in this sentence: "In writing this paper I have begun to understand, better than I ever have before" (67). It's the "I have begun to understand..." and the "better than I ever have before" that get at it...that illustrate that he is in process, figuring it out as he goes.

I assume that many people in this audience are aware of my obsession with writing and my concern with teaching that began with my early discomfort in school that led to my dropping out and flunking out. My academic writing is clearly autobiographical. (68)

An interesting and powerful confession: "Yes, I confess it, I wrote, and write, for therapy. Writing autobiography is my way of making meaning of the life I have led and am leading and may lead" (70). I somehow love that he says this.

The Murray self-deprecating humor: "Let's look at another autobiographical poem, one of my favorites, which, I suppose, means that it was one I especially needed to write for no autobiographical reason I can identify. It has not yet been published, although a great many of the best poetry editors in the country have failed in their obligation to Western culture by rejecting it" (70).

I love this line: "We become what we write. That is one of the great magics of writing" (71).

We see Murray drawing on his favorite sources in this piece, published and famous writers. I'm struck by the way he uses Melville in the following passage, so casually--as someone he might consult when he faces a difficult question. This is interesting: "Is the setting real? Let Herman Melville answer, 'It is not down on any map: true places never are'" (72). Other sources include Robert Frost, Ledo Ivo, Don Delillo, Graham Greene, Willa Cather.

I find the following passage incredibly useful. How do writers work? What do they do? What are their techniques? Murray gives us this and if I'm asking the question what is he good for or how is he useful, this is one thing he's useful for: helping clarify process or expand what is possible. It is useful to listen to the writer describe his craft, what he goes through, the nuts and bolts and nitty gritty of it. This passage captures it brilliantly:

One technique, I've been using, especially in writing the novel, is to layer my writing. Once I did quite a bit of oil painting and my pictures were built up, layer after layer of paint until the scene was revealed to me and a viewer. I've been writing each chapter of the novel the same way, starting each day at the beginning of the chapter, reading and writing until the timer bings and my daily stint is finished. Each day I lay down a new layer of text and when I read it the next day, the new layer reveals more possibility.

There is no one way the chapters develop. Each makes its own demands, struggles towards birth in its own way. Sometimes it starts with a sketch, other times the first writing feels complete [next day's reading usually shows it is not]; sometimes I race ahead through the chapter, other times each paragraph is honed before I go on to the next one. I try to allow the text to tell me what it needs.

I start reading and when I see--or, more likely, hear--something that needs doing, I do it. One day I'll read through all the written text and move it forward from the last day's writing; another time I'll find myself working on dialogue; the next day I may begin to construct a new scene [the basic element of fiction); one time I'll stumble into a new discovery, later have to set it up or weave references to it through the text; I may build up background description, develop the conflict, make the reader see a character more clearly; I may present more documentation, evidence, or exposition, or hide it in a character's dialogue or action. (72-73)

Boy, if this is not Murray at his best, in his instructive/manifesto mode, I don't know what is:

I do not think we should move away from personal or reflective narrative in composition courses, but closer to it; I do not think we should limit reflective narrative to a single genre; I do not think we should make sure our students write on many different subjects, but that they write and rewrite in pursuit of those few subjects which obsess them. (73)

This ties in nicely with the idea of Murray and student-centered pedagogy, and perhaps the student-centered movement is something I need to look into at some point, to try to place Don within that movement. I don't even know who coined the term or when. But here is Don nailing down his basic idea, tying it into a source (academic writing) and reiterating what he has said for so long: we start with the student and his/her obsessions. Learning begins with the students and not the subjects.

In Notebooks of the Mind (U of New Mexico P, 1985), a seminal book for our discipline, Vera John-Steiner documents the importance of obsession. "Creativity requires a continuity of concern, an intense awareness of one's active inner life combined with sensitivity to the external world." Again and again she documents the importance of allowing and even cultivating the obsessive interest of a student in a limited area of study. I read that as the importance of encouraging and supporting the exploration of the autobiographical themes of individual students-and the importance of allowing ourselves to explore the questions that itch our lives. (73)

This is not the kind of source that Don usually draws on in his work. Also, I note the phrase "our discipline"--his thinking that he is still a member of the discipline, whether or not the discipline still counts him as the kind of member he wants to be?

Final note: Murray shares his own writing here: poetry, fiction, newspaper column, textbook, academic article itself.