To open the semester, my professor assigned Donald M. Murray’s article titled “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product” in our text Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: a Reader. Let me tell you this piece truly spoke to me – this author realized students are learning a craft as opposed to a teacher’s craft. The way I write is not the same as anyone else, therefore my expectations for my students should never measure their words in comparison to my own. “No matter how careful our criticisms, they do not help the student since when we teach composition we are not teaching a product, we are teaching a process” (Murray p. 3). Imagine that! The concept seems rather novel, yet at the same time it seems asinine our teachers don’t already realize it’s all about the process! While hand-holding young children while teaching the writing process is necessary to immerse not-yet fluent minds, how could this hand-holding possibly assist the seasoned student? If you teach a student to depend upon an instructor for prompts and guidance, the student may never find the voice unique to themselves. You have no more knowledge of baking a cake after watching an episode of “Cupcake Wars” on Food Network than you do watching someone else write. “…[Y]ou don’t learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it” (Murray p. 5). Murray goes on further to state “[w]e must respect our student for his potential truth that may reveal a voice” (p. 5). The truth, the voice – these are powerful indicators of one’s own individual experience of life. So many of the bloggers I’ve crossed taut finding your truth, your voice, your authentic self. This article cements the concept in an academic text!
The concept of teaching a student the process of writing to find his or her own truth carried over into the second week’s readings. Richard Fulkerson cited an example from Lawrence Langer of a “forty-year-old student who in childhood had been in a Nazi concentration camp in which her parents had been killed” (p. 435). Imagine the trauma embedded deep within that woman’s core. Fulkerson goes on to say that this brave woman finally tackled her unspoken truth in an assignment only to be met with harsh criticism from her educator based upon the writing style! “The only comment was ‘Your theme is not clear – you should have developed your first paragraph. You talk around your subject’” (p. 435). A holocaust survivor made an effort to process her experience in a concentration camp, but this “teacher” only cared about the format and completely stifled the truth slowing unraveling from a traumatized woman. The humanities are supposed to be about the human experience, and yet we have been taught to approach the field in such a way that measures quantitatively like the STEM fields. Teaching students to write requires a qualitative approach and a willingness to recreate the rules.
Works Cited
Fulkerson, Richard. “Four Philosophies of Composition.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Miller, Susan. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009, pp. 430-435.
Murray, Donald M. “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product.” Cross-talk in Comp Theory: a Reader. Villanueva, Victor, and Kristin L. Arola. National Council of Teachers of English, 2011, pp 3-6.
